In this Netopia 3Qs feature, CCP’s Hilmar Veigar Pétursson reflects on three defining elements of EVE Online and the wider tech moment: the meaning of in-game money, the role of friendship in persistent worlds, and the accelerating impact of AI on how games and perhaps everything else are built.
From ISK to “the friendship ship” to AI-assisted development, the throughline is consistent: systems scale, but meaning emerges from how people use them. In EVE Online, that has meant economies that outlive currencies, friendships that outlast gameplay loops, and now tools that may reshape how entire worlds are built.
On In-game money
Per Strömbäck:
I want to also ask you about the in-game economy. There’s ISK, but it’s nothing to do with Icelandic króna. Is that right? It’s Interstellar Credits. Is that right?
More people use the EVE ISK than the Icelandic ISK — that’s one metric where we’ve won.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
Yes. Yeah, it’s Interstellar Credits with a K because it’s cool and it’s definitely a bit of a homage to the Icelandic króna which we’ve… I mean, I guess we had assumed we would no longer be using it. But here we are in Iceland, still using the króna, which is the, I think, smaller, smallest currency system in the world. And I often joke about the fact that more people use the EVE ISK than the Icelandic ISK. So I mean, that’s some metric where we have won. I mean, the Icelandic fish money is still going strong, but at least we, we, we will keep it alive in EVE Online forever, regardless of what Iceland decides.
On Friendship
Per Strömbäck:
And what is it that keeps the players coming back to the game over time?
People play for decades because they’ve made meaningful friendships — often some of their best in life — through EVE.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
So, we actually did a big study into that. We kicked it off in 2015, and we got some of the main results in 2018. And the big takeaway was people play online for decades because they have made new meaningful friendships from the game, and they often regard some of their best friends just in life overall as people they’ve met through EVE.
We were not really designing the game to be like this, but it turns out all the harshness of EVE and the shared context of EVE, meaning everyone is playing the same game in one persistent universe, help create and forge friendships. It is a fairly harsh game, and if you make a mistake, it can be extremely punishing, but these properties lend themselves well to building strong social bonds.
It has even become a strong meme in the community that the best ship in EVE Online is the friendship ship. Obviously it is a game about spaceships, but the best ship is friendship. That is a compressed version of the idea that EVE is a better experience if you have friends in it, and that your power in EVE is almost a function of your friendship network inside the game.
On AI Trends
Per Strömbäck:
You talked a little bit before about how this has played out in your company with the tools and prototypes that were previously not possible, but now you can make them. How do you see this playing out for your business?
We now have capabilities that let us go after that vision at a much better pace.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson:
So I’m, I mean, I see it very clearly. This is a game with enormous scope, comparable to EVE Online, which has been in development for 23 years and is still nowhere near fully realised. Here we have a relatively small team tackling something of that scale.
What has changed is that we now have capabilities that let us go after that vision at a much better pace. We’ve definitely seen development speed pick up. We were just finishing a major update last week, and compared to the previous release, it was greatly assisted by agentic engineering.
That has been a massive boon for morale and momentum and for belief that we might actually be able to pull this off. It makes it easier to see how we can deliver a first version of something with that kind of scope.
What’s also interesting is that we are building part of it as a modding platform, and we assumed this would mainly be used by engineers. But now we’re seeing people who are not engineers creating things that are often more interesting, because their imagination is less constrained. They no longer have to worry about the mechanics of coding. They can just use tools like Claude to do it for them.
For the full interview – see below
