CCP Games buyout restores independence, rebrands as Fenris Creations

CCP Games has bought its way back to independence, rebranding as Fenris Creations after a $120 million management-led transaction that includes cash and non-cash consideration. The studio said the new ownership group is made up of senior management and long-term investors, and that Fenris is now governed by its own Board of Directors.

For Nintendo workers, the striking part is not just the buyout but the governance model. Fenris said leadership, studios, products and ongoing development plans remain unchanged, and that there will be no restructuring or layoffs tied to the transition. It is a rare reversal in an industry that usually rewards scale, not autonomy: instead of being folded deeper into a publisher’s machine, the studio is trying to protect the people closest to EVE Online from the churn that often follows consolidation.

That matters because CCP was built around long time horizons. The company was founded in 1997 in Reykjavík, Iceland, and launched EVE Online in May 2003. Pearl Abyss acquired CCP in 2018, and at the time said CCP would continue to operate independently as a developer with studios in Reykjavík, London and Shanghai. Now the ownership has shifted again, back to a model Fenris says is closer to how it operated before 2018, with strategic decision-making aimed at persistent live games and long-running virtual worlds.

The new structure also comes with an AI research partnership that is likely to get attention well beyond Iceland. Fenris said Google DeepMind will take a minority stake and work with an offline local-server version of EVE Online to study long-horizon planning, memory and continual learning. The company said the collaboration will also explore new gameplay experiences. For developers inside Nintendo, where franchise stewardship and technical discipline matter as much as creative ambition, the message is simple: outside capital and outside research do not have to erase identity if the ownership structure is built to preserve it.

That is why this buyout lands as more than a corporate shuffle. Fenris says it will continue supporting EVE with what it calls forever in mind, a reminder that some live games are not content cycles to be optimized and exited. They are multi-decade businesses whose day-to-day work is shaped as much by who owns the studio as by what is printed on the box.