The company behind the long-running space sim Eve Online has entered into a partnership with Google in which the search giant will take a minority stake. In exchange, Google’s DeepMind will train its AI technology on the game, according to a report by Bloomberg.
CCP Games, the dev who made and maintains Eve Online, has also been rebranded as Fenris Creations. This happened just after the company purchased the rights to the game back from Korean developer Pearl Abyss.
Google’s investment is “in the millions” of dollars, according to Fenris Creations Chief Executive Officer Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. DeepMind is going to first study player behavior on isolated servers, as Eve Online “requires skills that AI has not yet fully mastered.” This is according to DeepMind’s Adrian Bolton, who mentioned hurdles like “long-term planning and continual learning.”
Eve Online has been around for over 20 years and is known for giving players an unprecedented amount of choice with how they navigate the game world. This makes it an extremely attractive source of social simulation data for DeepMind’s tech to sink its teeth into. “We jokingly say that the final boss for AI in games would obviously be Eve Online,” Pétursson said. “Eve is giving insights about our own society and the human condition.”
Will players get anything out of this collaboration besides having their actions tracked and catalogued by researchers? The companies promise this partnership “will also explore new gameplay experiences enabled by these technologies.” That’s incredibly vague, but whatever.
Google’s AI lab has previously trained its technology on other games, from arcade classics to StarCraft II. As for the newly-minted Fenris Creations, it’s creating or maintaining several titles in the universe of Eve Online. There’s the upcoming FPS-focused spinoff Eve Vanguard and the recently-launched mobile title Eve Galaxy Conquest.
Finally, there’s the likely-doomed Eve Frontier. This is some kind of blockchain-based spinoff that used to be called Project Awakening.
