Eve Online creator CCP Games has appointed a former economist at the Central Bank of Iceland as its new Head of Economy. In this role, Stefán Þórarinsson will be conducting “experiments” where he will tinker with the virtual economy of its upcoming blockchain-based survival game Eve Frontier—in the quest of creating the perfect player-driven financial system.
Þórarinsson believes that there aren’t any significant differences between working with real-world economies and virtual ones. That said, the major challenge he sees is the lack of research and data there is regarding virtual—and especially blockchain-backed—economies.
As such, his first “experiment” will mostly focus on recording and observing how the world of Eve Frontier works while the game is currently in a closed alpha state with a limited player pool. Eve Frontier is being built in the Ethereum ecosystem on Redstone, a gaming-centric network for autonomous worlds created with Optmism layer-2 scaling tech.
“We want to do mappings of the pricing system, so when there are changes, we know what’s going to happen.” Þórarinsson told Decrypt, “We need to get data on how monetary policy impacts the Frontier economy and, in the best case scenario, we would get the demand curves and supply curves. We need a lot of data.”
“The next experiments are contingent on the results from this experiment,” he explained. “But the goal is just to get a better understanding of the closed economy before we decide sometime in the cycle that we will open it—and then we get more information.”
By a closed economy, Þórarinsson is referring to the game not yet having a token that can be exchanged for real-world currencies. Once the economy opens up to this possibility, the stakes get much higher. Given that, he wants the financial system to be as perfect as possible before then.
After this initial experiment, the game will enter a series of 60-day cycles in which new gameplay and economic features will be added to the game to further the “grand experiment,” as CCP Games CEO Hilmar Pétursson put it.
All of this is in the quest to build a simple, yet flexible player-driven economy. At its core, Eve Frontier is a survival game, so much of the infancy of its economy surrounds sustaining the brutal world CCP Games has created. Once players are comfortable with living in the world—a world that Pétursson once told Decrypt is “literally trying to kill you”—then they next need to defend themselves against other players which, in turn, creates new economies in the game.
But after this, Eve Frontier wants to leave it to the player to decide where to go next.
“The economy, at some point, takes on a life of its own and ideally lives to such a point in time that Stefán and I don’t have to be involved,” Pétursson told Decrypt. “The world has become autonomous, and the society within it has been shaped into taking over all the roles.”
In Eve Frontier, players can create custom missions and bounties by writing a smart contract using Ethereum language Solidity. At its most basic level, this can help a player obtain an in-game resource they’re struggling to get themselves. But at its most advanced, players could craft the beginnings of a new economy and replace the need for CCP Games to warden the game’s evolution.
“We should provide a very transparent survival ground for them to show what they can do,” Þórarinsson explained. “It’s a player-driven virtual world. That’s what we want to build.”
Pétursson told Decrypt that he expects the economy to be opened up within the next couple of quarters, meaning a token launch would likely happen during this period. But he admits it will be years until CCP Games is “fully hands-off,” leaving Eve Frontier with a fully self-sustaining economy underpinned by autonomous smart contracts.
“This really is a game-changer, for lack of a better word—for not only games but for the world overall,” he said, in reference to Eve Frontier’s usage of smart contracts. It’s similar to how AI and graphics cards (or GPUs) proliferated in the gaming world before being adopted and expanded for uses in other industries, Pétursson observed.
“Games often have a tendency to show the way quicker to the rest of the world,” he concluded.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
