EVE Online Creator Is Making a Triple-A Web3 Game

One of gaming’s most respected studios is developing a flagship Web3 title, and they’ve raised $40 million to pull it off

by Sebastian Sinclair /

March 22, 2023 06:40 am

EVE Online Drifter(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); Source: Bryan Ward/Flickr, modified by Blockworks

EVE Online creator CCP Games is going Web3, having raised $40 million to develop a blockchain-integrated triple-A spinoff set within its sandbox sci-fi universe.

CCP Games said the game will build upon its blockchain-related findings from its research and development team.

“With advancements made within blockchain, we can forge a new universe deeply imbued with our expertise in player agency and autonomy,” CCP Games head Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said in a statement, published under a “Project Awakening” domain name.

While the Icelandic studio’s Web3 title — currently unnamed — will take place within the EVE Online universe, it will be standalone. Crypto-forward venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, with participation from Makers Fund and BITKRAFT Ventures.

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Key game elements will utilize smart contracts with attention paid to composability, open third-party development and persistence of data, CCP Games said.

It’s unclear whether the title will interact with public blockchain networks like Ethereum, as is the case with metaverse offerings such as Decentraland and The Sandbox. Blockworks has reached out for comment.

In any case, a venerable studio in CCP Games embracing Web3 is a milestone for the budding entertainment sector.

EVE Online, published 20 years ago, has long been a staple of the massively-multiplayer genre, still averaging more than 273,000 daily players with a total base of around 9.5 million accounts. Its grand-scale battles have become fixtures of gaming history and internet lore.

A fraction of that player base could present a considerable boon for blockchain gaming, which sees considerably less user stats in recent times.

“It’s a great sentiment, in general, having a serious team backed by a respectable firm for the Web3 gaming market,” Andrii Yasinetsky CEO and co-founder of NFT data analytics firm Mnemonic told Blockworks.

Blockchain gaming could bring regular users to Web3 and attract further investment for other developers looking to build similar products, Yasinetsky said.

An executive at Fortnite maker Epic Games recently noted nearly 20 third-party, crypto-enabled games are expected to hit its online store over the next year.

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