Fenris Creations regains independence, ownership shifts in $120 million deal

Fenris Creations returned to independence with a $120 million ownership change that left its studios, leadership and development plans in place, a rare deal that looks more like a reset of control than a corporate overhaul. For Nintendo workers watching how long-running games are steered, the signal is straightforward: the people making the decisions at the top matter just as much as the capital behind them.

The company, formerly CCP Games, said on May 6 that it was once again operating as an independent entity under the Fenris Creations name and governed by its own board of directors. Its ownership group now includes senior management and long-term investors, and the company said the shift was a change in ownership and governance only. Pearl Abyss sold all 10,973,763 CCP shares held by its Iceland subsidiary, and described the divestment as a move to improve financial structure and management efficiency. The consideration included both cash and non-cash elements.

For Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, the structure appears designed to protect the kind of decision-making a persistent online world demands. He said the board setup was meant to support the far-reaching decisions EVE requires, which is a reminder that live-service games are often won or lost on stewardship, not just launches. The broader ownership story makes the reversal more notable: Pearl Abyss bought CCP Games in 2018, paying $225 million upfront with additional performance-based consideration that was supposed to lift the deal’s value further.

The timing also matters. Fenris Creations said EVE Online finished 2025 with a record-breaking revenue month in November and its second-highest revenue quarter in the game’s more than 20-year history in the fourth quarter. Reporting around the studio’s 2025 results put revenue above $70 million and showed the business remained profitable, which helps explain why management and investors may have been willing to back a buyout instead of pushing for a deeper corporate integration.

Fenris Creations also tied its independence to a new research partnership with Google DeepMind. The work will use an offline version of EVE Online on a local server to study intelligence in complex, dynamic systems, focusing on long-horizon planning, memory and continual learning. Google took a minority stake as part of the transaction. For developers and producers, the message is that AI is moving further into studio strategy, but the real test is whether those tools help teams make better decisions over years, not just quarters. Fenris said EVE Vanguard and EVE Frontier remain part of the pipeline, giving the company a multi-project future to match its newly restored control.