Key takeaways from the EVE Fanfest 2016 opening keynote

The 12th annual EVE fanfest, the ‘árshátíð’ of players, developers and other stakeholders was kicked off yesterday with a keynote address by CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. He discussed the state and future plans of CCP the makers of EVE and a number of VR games. Norðurskautið was present, here are the main points from the keynote.

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  • Eve Gunjack was released in November and is, according to Hilmar, the best selling VR game in the history of mankind (we are not sure of what that means in numbers).
  • Hilmar mentioned the $30 million financing round to boost VR development. They want to make sure that CCP has the capital to take a long-term bet on VR with full freedom to push projects faster/slower without having to worry about other projects.
  • They focus on three VR modes of interaction:
    On the go – EVE Gunjack
    Sitting down – EVE Valkyrie
    Standing up – Project Arena
  • He half-joked that they study and analyse the current political climate in Iceland following the Panama papers leak as inspiration for EVE online.
  • CCP’s mobile team in Shanghai is working on secret stuff that will be announced at the fanfest in 2017.
  • EVE Valkyrie will offer cross platform play between Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.
  • The team in Shanghai that worked on Dust 514 has pivoted to Project Nova a free to play first person shooter.

Cover photo by Brynjar Snær (via CCP).

Norðurskautið covers the Icelandic Startup and Tech scene. Follow us on Twitter or sign up for our mailing list to keep up to date. You can also join our Slack community – http://bit.ly/slack-is

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