How EVE Frontier is using crypto to change the game
Eve Frontier devs share their vision for crypto-powered space battle
EVE and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Eve Frontier — an upcoming MMO from Eve Online studio CCP Games — isn’t your typical crypto game.
In fact, it’s probably more accurate to call it an expansive survival space MMO with blockchain rails that let players effectively “mod” the game to create their own features and challenges. And yes, there will be an EVE token underpinning it all, as well.
CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson has been in game development for over 25 years building Eve Online. That game has over 7,800 star systems, a complex economy and ever-evolving, long-term battles driven by players.
And it’s been live for 22 years.
“The loop of creation to destruction is kind of the heart of the economy loop,” Pétursson told me in an interview. “And this is often what games get wrong at the heart of it, if things don’t leave the economy, then it’s, by definition, almost like a mathematical definition, an inflationary economy. The effects of an inflationary economy is that you add stuff into it, but you never take them out.”
When it comes to strategy, the worlds are designed in a way that encourages interactions between players.
“First, we create nature, a strategic landscape that requires specialization, cooperation and conflict. Conflict creates destruction that takes that loop — and we have that look pretty tight from Eve — then we add this energy mechanic. That’s where the token comes in,” Pétursson said of Eve Frontier.
“So that’s kind of the economy side. When we look at the general blockchain side, then we have created something called smart assembly, which is basically a combination of an in-game item and a smart contract. This allows you to basically program all the phenomena inside the world.”
Pétursson used an example where one player created a stargate using smart assembly that requires other players to bring the dead body of his enemy in order to use it.
“This is something that the player just programmed into the world without our permission. We needed to do nothing,” Pétursson said.
Eve Frontier is using the EVM L2 chain Redstone (built using the OP Stack codebase) for its blockchain elements.
While Eve Frontier comes from the same parent studio as Eve Online, there’s only overlap in a few areas on the development side that’s been symbiotic.
The new game’s team is building autonomously, Eve Frontier Community Manager Ben Sisson told me in an interview.
CCP has a separate design team for Eve Frontier as well as a separate team focused on the game’s crypto elements. Eve Online and Eve Frontier’s finances and funding are separate as well.
“CCP doesn’t use Eve Online money to pay Eve Frontier staff,” Sisson explained. But like Eve Online, Eve Frontier will generate revenue through a subscription-based model.
Both games do use CCP’s own Carbon game engine, though, so there is some overlap on the platform side.
“We did a huge engine upgrade last year, spent almost all of 2024 working on this engine upgrade,” Sisson said. “That team was doing that at the behest of Frontier. But that is a change that’s also going to benefit Eve Online.”
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