Eve Frontier is an ‘evil’ crypto spinoff of Eve Online its makers couldn’t shut down if they wanted to

Even Pétursson and CCP have rarely done things as differently as they’re attempting to with their next game. Eve Frontier looks superficially similar to its sister (or parent) game Eve Online: It’s an online spaceship game of battles, mining, and base-building. It takes place in a remote part of the same universe, and the gameplay has been given a tough survival twist.

But Frontier’s Smart Assemblies propose a radical form of user-generated content, allowing players to build custom tools and write new game rules directly onto the game servers; it’s essentially integrated modding in an MMO. CCP is also building Frontier on a form of blockchain tech that will allow for cryptocurrency trading and business-building within the game. This has been intensely controversial with the Eve Online community, who are suspicious of the implied business model.

Eve Frontier is not the first time CCP has attempted a radical spinoff of Eve Online’s dense, political, notoriously impenetrable online world. There have been several: one, Dust 514, was a first-person shooter in which console players would essentially play the role of cannon-fodder for Eve Online’s ruling class of space industrialists and ship pilots. CCP shut it down in 2016.

Pétursson’s goal is that this fate will not befall Frontier, not because it’s too good or too successful, but because it’s literally impossible to turn off — in his words, that it “can’t be stopped.” He argues that peer-to-peer technologies like the blockchain — as well as CCP’s move to make its engine open-source — will enable online games that belong to their players, and that are as unstoppable as the internet itself. Eve Frontier is the first step toward a dream that, in the summer of Stop Killing Games, seems more relevant than ever.

I talked about all this with Pétursson in a video call earlier this summer. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Polygon: How long have you been working on Eve Frontier?

Hilmar Pétursson: In part, all my life, at least preparing for it, it seems! Concretely, in its current incarnation, I would say 2021.

I think the seed that sparked the part of using a blockchain probably is from 2015. At that point, somebody explained to me how you could use the Bitcoin protocol to store other things than Bitcoin values, and at that time I was very obsessed about this sort of forever concept. My background prior to CCP was actually building decentralized architectures in the late ’90s, which were very much about this kind of… Well, that particular thing was more just because computers were crap and servers were even crappier. So having a peer-to-peer system was almost like a way to even just get something to function.

But it is very deeply embedded into the internet itself. It is this lack of centralization, authority, control. I mean, the internet was literally created by DARPA such that it couldn’t be destroyed. So there’s layer upon layer of this kind of resilience, forever, that came from there.

And that was the genesis for this game, the idea of using blockchain technology?

I think the genesis was this: having something go on without it being stoppable. I think we see that differently now with this kind of — whether games live or die, especially games as a service. Can you play a game a decade later? That’s a big topic in the world right now.

Then as we talked deeper, especially when the smart contract blockchains came along, then OK, this could be used for modding. And then, since the dawn of time, I’ve been interested in closed economies and open economies, mainly because I come from Iceland and I’ve grown up with a closed Icelandic economy under currency control. So I think these are the three things that have been rattling in my brain for a long time and they came into focus in 2021.

What do you mean by not stoppable? Is Eve Online stoppable in that sense?

It’s very stoppable. It’s a database in the Docklands area [in London, U.K.]. It’s owned by a company. You can stop it. I mean, it’s very resilient and it would be a pretty stupid thing to stop it right now, but it is stoppable. Somebody can stop it, and that is a form of agency and we can manifest that agency in me. Eve Online‘s existence is concretely beholden to the CEO of CCP. I do not wear that responsibility lightly in any way, but it shouldn’t be like that. It should be like the internet. Nobody can stop it, it will just exist. Because then you can claim “Eve Forever” [a CCP marketing slogan], just like you can, I think with good reasoning, claim the internet forever.

How do the blockchain and smart contracts make that a reality?

I would rather put the focus on a peer-to-peer design rather than the current implement of a database ledger run by consensus. Currently, [the blockchain] is the best construct to achieve that. And I know that because I’ve tried this before, in the late ’90s.

[Back then, a] fully peer-to-peer infrastructure with a game was fully playable. But [it was] like a Minecraft Creative Mode. You can’t really do anything that has any relevance. A blockchain is arguably a way to make Survival Mode, but it is just currently the best implement. It’s more about that than it being like a goal in and of itself, like the construct has upheld this element of: You can do transactions and nobody mediates. And you can also program on top of it, which is like an extra feature and that opens the door for server-side modding of an MMO, which is now what we have created.

[For us, the blockchain] is more about distribution, it’s more about decentralization, it’s more about transactions that are sound you can maintain, it’s more about persistency, it’s more about unstoppability and forever. It just so happens these blockchains are now currently good enough to start working in that domain, but they also have a long way to go.

But as a consequence, now most recently I’ve gotten very deep in the actual cryptography side of things, like the math of cryptography and the computer science, and that has come a long way since I was doing it back in the ’90s. There are some new-fangled instruments like serial knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, and indistinguishability obfuscation. If you put that in a Polygon article, that would be… [giggles]

I will if I can find a spelling for it.

There’s a good Wikipedia article. Anyway, I’m droning on in too much geek language, but I hope it does give you a sense of, this is a way to implement a vision, but it’s not an end in and of itself. It just so happens we can get pretty close to that vision with a current technology, and more is coming that we can get even closer.

This has had quite a strong reaction from some people in the Eve community. They’re worried that it’s going to be about transactions between players, people sinking a lot of real money into the game. What would you say in response to those concerns?

Well, I think it’s not surprising and very understandable. If somebody has used the thing to do mostly shit then of course that thing gets associated with it. I would encourage you to go to the Eve Frontier Reddit of people which are actually playing in Frontier. They talk about it very differently than people which are popping popcorn and watching it from afar and hoping it will fail in a schadenfreude kind of way, which I can absolutely appreciate.

I think the gaming industry generally is obsessing a little bit about what it is to make games, create them as businesses, and externalizing that quite a bit. If you listen to gaming companies these days — and I’m guilty of this, like anyone really — there’s a lot of talk about the ingredients and it’s like talking about sausages and the way they’re made. “We’re going to use this machine from this company to take that and take sheep guts and grind them into whatever sheep stomach and then you’re going to love it.” We sound a bit like this. “We’re going to have this business model, we’re going to use this thing, we’re going to use this whatever texturing filtering thing, we’re going to have it 4K, no, we’re going to have it 8K.”

It’s like, OK, nobody really cares about this. People care about the game being good, and a lot of these things are frankly very often irrelevant in that journey. Never in a million years did we say, “Come play Eve Online. It is literally the first database game ever made. It uses SQL server and store procedures, and it has this Excel grid-like thing, we call it Excel in space on top of Microsoft SQL Server.” [laughs]

All this is true, but I think a lot of the anxiety people feel is about business model, about how they’re going to pay, how they’re going to interact with the game financially. And I’d like to know from your side how you envisage that for players.

The general idea is that we will do it very similarly to Eve. There’s going to be a subscription component that has worked very well with Eve and should work well with Frontier. So we will largely use that. Then the rest will be as much peer-to-peer as can be. Similar to how PLEX [an Eve Online trading currency] enables peer-to-peer trading of subscription time where I can buy PLEX, trade with you for ISK [Eve’s in-game currency, and also the official abbreviation for Iceland’s currency, the króna] and CCP taxes the transaction.

Then we very much want to build an infrastructure where people can build businesses of their own on top of the game. Because in the long journey of Eve Online, we have had thousands of people who have built software around the game, but there is no way for those services to become businesses. Most of the people that run these websites, they run Google ads to pay for their AWS bill, very much in servicing the community kind of spirit, very beautiful. But expecting that of people for decades is expecting a lot. I have long wanted to create a flexible business model where somebody could extend, mod the game, add to the game and build their own business on top of that and then have a functional business model like that.

Give me a practical example of how that might work. Like, a player builds something using one of the Smart Structures, maybe a tournament. How would they turn that into a business within Frontier?

So, here’s where the open versus closed economy comes in. If I take an example from when Iceland was a closed economy under currency controls: I am 9, I’m going to Denmark on vacation with my parents, they have to go to the bank with their plane tickets and get an allowance for Danish krone. They can now exchange Icelandic fish money [Icelandic coins feature depictions of fish] for Danish krone for two weeks’ equivalent of traveling to Denmark. They have plenty of money in Iceland, but they only have so many Danish crowns to spend. This obviously is very restrictive.

So, observe my emotional scarring from living in a fake economy [laughs]. When I think of building a virtual world, I think of it deeply as an economy. And currently the Eve economy is isolated, closed off from the rest of the world. So anyone that builds a business in current Eve Online, they could charge in ISK, but the ISK doesn’t have agency outside of Eve Online. You cannot take the ISK out of Eve Online any more than you could take the ISK out of Iceland.

What cryptocurrencies have created is that they’ve created a technical interruption framework and a legal construct where they can have validity in the overall scheme of national currencies. Most countries by now have framed where cryptocurrencies fit into their whole regime. People have not done that for game currencies. There is a way to do it: Second Life is an example of doing that. It involves getting a money market license in all 200 countries and 50 states of the U.S. It basically means you become a bank and are regulated as such, which is a lot of burden for a little small Icelandic game company to undergo for the purposes of allowing people to build little cottage businesses — hopefully turning into world domination, but at least in the beginning, they’re going to be relatively meager beginnings.

That’s why we wanted, we in a way needed, to build the whole game from scratch, because going and changing this premise for Eve Online 20 years after the fact, it’s too big of a change, and it’s also a very exploratory change. This is an R&D project from top to bottom. There’s a reason why nobody has done this functionally. It’s hard to pull it off. We obviously come a bit prepared from living with Eve Online and in a very weird situation growing up in Iceland; these two elements have created a framing which helps us.

Then there’s the UGC element, allowing players to mod the servers and build new game elements. What kind of models are you looking at? Are you looking at Roblox, Fortnite, or are you looking at something different in terms of how the UGC is going to fit into Frontier? Because you’re not creating a very thematically open playground the way Roblox is. It’s a very specific vision for this kind of dark survival space game.

Yes. The theme of dark, survival, hellish, capitalistic, brutalistic evil is picked for a reason because this is that kind of concept. If we were to have taken this idea and dressed it up in a cheery, cartoony, kidsy kind of way, that [wouldn’t be right].

This is an evil game. It is dangerous. You should probably not be doing this. CCP probably hasn’t fully thought this through. Not that we haven’t thought a lot about it, but the endgame of what this becomes, this is unleashing the Kraken onto our world. But I do believe that consenting adults should be allowed to engage in dangerous activity. Just like I can sign a contract with Nepal, I’m going to climb Mount Everest, and I’m most likely going to die. And it’s probably very stupid, but I can still do it. So if we want to die trying, it is still allowed.

So we think about it like that. Here is a capitalistic, brutalistic, cryptocurrency, self-programming, evil place. You should probably not visit. But if you sign this waiver, you will join consenting adults in being there.

A pre-release version of Eve Frontier is playable now on Windows PC and Mac. It’s available through paid Founder Access or by registering for limited free trial periods.