u/Daro_EVE

Pearl Abyss sold CCP back to its own management for $120M, and now Hilmar is running the show with no parent company, no board, and for the first time in 20+ years; nobody else to point a finger at if something goes wrong.

EVE Online is a money printer. It pulled around $60M a year for Pearl Abyss the whole time they owned it. The problem has never been EVE. The problem has been what CCP does with EVE’s money: World of Darkness. DUST 514. Valkyrie. Sparc. Gunjack. Nova. Project Legion. EVE Echoes (actually worked, except CCP doesn’t own it). Now we have EVE Vanguard and EVE Frontier.

Although I am a big fan of Frontier, you don’t have to look very hard to see a pattern of taking subscription revenue from the one thing that works and burning it on side projects that don’t. The reason Pearl Abyss is selling at a loss is not because EVE failed them. It’s because CCP failed them in the same way they failed Novator and General Catalyst.

The question you should all be wondering is where CCP came up with $120M. There are a couple potential options:

- Hilmar and other management bankrolled it themselves(probably not)

- CCP took on a debt that EVE’s revenue now has to service

- There is a new silent partner who hasn’t surfaced yet

None of those are particularly good for EVE players. Debt payments come out of the same pot that funds new content. Silent partners surface 18 months later with opinions.

But there are potential upsides as well. An independent CCP can move faster, and if Hilmar has genuinely learned something from a decade of failed spinoffs, a leaner CCP that stops trying to be Riot or Bungie could be healthier than anything Pearl Abyss would have allowed. But that case requires believing the same CEO who has been there since 2004 has fundamentally changed how he operates. That’s not a small ask.

Within the next 18-24 months, we will have a decisive answer on if Hilmar Veigar Pétursson is the same operator at 50 that he was at 30, or whether he’s finally figured out that the constraint his bosses kept imposing on him was the thing protecting his company from himself.