Hilmar Pétursson is CEO of CCP Games in Iceland, makers of the long-running space battle game EVE Online. Billed as the world’s largest living work of science fiction, EVE has a highly developed internal economy and deep social structure that makes it an ideal testbed for how the coming Metaverse could work.
Hilmar Pétursson is CEO of CCP Games in Iceland, makers of the long-running space battle game EVE Online. Billed as the world’s largest living work of science fiction, EVE has a highly developed internal economy and deep social structure that makes it an ideal testbed for how the coming Metaverse could work.
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Hilmar Pétursson is the CEO of CCP Games, makers of the long running space battle game, EVE Online.
While EVE's competitors have come and gone, This massively multiplayer online game is still going strong after 20 years, and many players have been playing for over a decade. How can a game inspire such fanatical devotion and long term retention?
Hilmar Pétursson: As EVE players say, the best ship in EVE Online is friendship, which is you are really a function of how many trusted people you have inside the game.
And this vamp of person to person relationships is really the reason why the game has been around for 20 years.
Amy: Listen in and find out how an [00:01:00] unlikely team of gaming newbies from Iceland created the longest running MMO of all time.
Hey guys, we're so thrilled to have Hilmar with us and he's going to tell us all about EVE Online. I'd like to get started with some background. And then we're going to do a deep dive into some of the most innovative and interesting systems in EVE. So, first off, Hilmar, thank you so much for being here.
We've been looking forward to this for weeks. How did you first get into gaming and tech? You know, those first steps that led you to what you're doing today.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yeah, so it probably starts when I'm nine, I am living in Iceland and I see an ad for a Sinclair Spectrum and for some reason, rather unknown to me, I really have to have one.
And I don't really know why I, I had that idea [00:02:00] because I've never seen a computer. I didn't know anyone that owned a computer, so I had no idea. Really what a computer one was, but I just had this deep calling that I had to have a Sinclair Spectrum and my parents didn't really have the money to buy a Sinclair Spectrum.
So I took out the paper route. So I woke up every morning at six and, uh, did the paper route for, for a few months to collect what was 6,450 ISK back then and went to the next town over to buy one. Then I have Sinclair Spectrum. I have my parent's black and white TV. And the instructions all in English and I don't really know English and my parents don't really know English.
So I spent a good week with a dictionary, figuring out how to hook everything up to get it to work. Then I started to buy magazines and type in programs on the rubber keys and I've kind of been doing that ever since.
Amy: Wow. That's, that's a lot of motivation. So how did Eve first come into be? [00:03:00]
Hilmar Pétursson: So a lot of us were working at a company in Iceland called ORS Interactive.
ORS Interactive is founded in Iceland in '92, basically to make the metaverse. Very much inspired by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. And, and the idea was to use VRML, virtual reality modeling language, which was kind of a markup standard that was supposed to be like the foundation of the 3D version of the internet.
HTML was the, was the foundation for the 2D version. VRML was, was to be the foundation of the, of the 3D version. And this company had developed VRML browser. There were few VRML browsers at the time, but was virtual was the name of this one. And it had built in most user and social features. So you could create an avatar, you could, uh, kind of customize your avatar.
The avatar could move dance, et cetera. So you could travel these VRML worlds with others. Most VRML browser at the time were kind of [00:04:00] like HTML browsers. It was just you browsing a fairly sort of single player experience. I joined my company in '96 and there's a good group of people there. Also had this interesting aspect that it was able to collect kind of the, the smartest of a nation.
There wasn't really much going on in Iceland back then. So everyone that was kind of interested in these kinds of things. I'd kind of congregated at this company and we have a pretty good run from like '96, 7, 8, going around the world showing this, we're having concerts online. We're having motion captured singers perform for audiences in real life and virtually all at the same time, all through this VRML browser, voice over IP implementations.
But we kind of start to realize that nobody's really looking for this. So, um, there is a bit of a entity crisis of that company on, on, on where we would take that. And there was kind of two ideas. One was to [00:05:00] take some of the technology we've built. There was a lot of scalable server technology, et cetera, and go into mobile messaging, which seems far away from virtual reality, but what we have created that a lot of relevance to that.
And it was kind of an emerging, emerging thing. The other one was to make more like a game and game was called Cosmos. What's the idea? The company decided to pivot into a mobile messaging and then spin off the VRML technology. I actually spun off the VRML technology. Into a company called Smart VR, where we did sort of work for hire for education, language learning, and sort of industrial heavy machinery training and whatnot.
And we could eke out an existence on that front. And then a group, another group founded CCP to basically take what they had learned outdoors to make it online. CCP actually spends its first years making a family board game to kind of provide seed capital. Playing a lot of Ulti online and I am doing the spinoff of the smart VR company.
Then [00:06:00] around 2000 start of 2000, the time is has come to actually start to make Eve. I am kind of headhunted over as CTO and I joined in March, 2000 to basically kind of help make the game. At the time, there were two engineers at the company and the plan was to make it online in 18 months, which was. A pretty crazy plan, but with a few more people and a little more time, we eventually got it done.
Amy: Was that your first game?
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes.
Amy: Other than the family board game.
Hilmar Pétursson: So this was the first game for everyone in Iceland. Nobody in Iceland had made the game before. And it was even to the point that nobody in the EVE team, that's CFD Online, had met the game developer before, not even seen one from afar. So there are, there are many aspects of EVE Online, some of its most beautiful things, and some of its, some of the things the game has struggled with for a long time is due to the fact that nobody really had made a game before on the team.
Amy: Right, totally. [00:07:00] So one of the really notable things about EVE is player retention. It's been around for almost a couple of decades now, based on your story. Yes? Yes. And it's not for everybody, as James told us, you know, you can fall off if it's not for you. But the people who enjoy EVE, just there's this insane player retention.
Now that you're standing here looking back at the mistakes and the good things you did, and you know, all the things that we creators have to do to just get stuff shipped, all the compromises. Why do you think it's got that kind of retention? What's your understanding?
Hilmar Pétursson: So all throughout the game's development, we, we kind of had this operating thesis that people would join for the graphics and stay for the community.
That was kind of the shorthand we had created. And, and we have basically been operating the company on this basis [00:08:00] for maybe the good first 15 years, where we are acutely aware of the fact that people stay for an hour. for a long time in EVE Online due to the, the community that has been created around it.
But we went and did pretty deep study in 2010. I think we started doing it. We had a researcher who spent a lot of time doing surveys, did about a hundred interviews with EVE players and gathered together a lot of insights into this in a lot, lot deeper way than we, We have done before because the joint for the graphics day for the community is another actionable concept.
It's hard for a, for an individual on a game development team to understand how you relate to building for a community in a, in a very aggregated sense. And it's also true. And you learn that pretty quickly that most communities are. Uh, collection of micro communities within them. But in any case, what we found out is that it is more [00:09:00] person to person relationship that really formed the community.
So EVE Online is really held together by friendships that have been created because of the game. So we found with people that are really stayed with EVE Online for a long time. We always found this kind of story of, of how people got into, uh, Into kind of making a friend inside the game. And, and that is a lot more actionable than gen photographic stay for the community.
So as we started to get a more sort of facile sense that it's really person to person relationship that create this web, uh, let's call it retention. That's really make up the community. Then we started to, to think more about how does a friendship really get created? And there is actually a formula for how our relationships are created.
The formula has four components. It's proximity, duration, frequency, and intensity. [00:10:00] So to make a friend, you have to have proximity to the person. There has to be a certain frequency to the interaction. If it is somebody that you just meet once a year, it is not likely to develop into a deep friendship.
There, there needs to be duration. It's a very short engagement. Maybe it's a person you meet at a coffee shop. Kind of every day on the way to work that's frequent and has proximity, but not long duration. And then there has to be intensity. And what we found out is that line mainly due to its death penalty, which was always something we. We were acutely focused on ever since the, the, the first line of the script of Evil Eye is death is a serious matter. So we were very much intuitively on that vein to begin with, but that intensity is really what forces the relationships. And, and there are kind of time factors for this formula. It takes like a hundred hours to make an acquaintance, it takes 300 hours to make a friend.
It takes [00:11:00] like a thousand hours to make a childhood life long friend kind of level. But the intensity of the interaction accelerates this quite a bit. And we have heard a lot of people that have, for example, gone to war with others and have been involved in actual combat, they say that EVE Online feels kind of similar to that, which is obviously very humbling to hear.
I have no experience in, in that myself, but it seems that this intensity part of EVE Online, where there really is something at stake, um, every single time you untuck your chair. And the friends you have and the trust you have in the game is really your major asset. As EVE players say, the best ship in EVE Online is friendship, which is like you are really a function of how many trusted people you have inside the game.
And this web of person to person relationships that form micro community and then the aggregate community is really the reason why the game has, has [00:12:00] been around for 20 years.
Amy: That's really great. Many, many games. Aspire to come for the game, stay for the community, stay for the friendships. Many of us in this room aspire to build systems like that.
It's actually hard to do, right? Like you manage to execute on that. So let's talk about some of the core systems of Eve. Let's talk about corporations, which are your version of guilds. So a theme that's running through Eve's design is that Is consequences.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes.
Amy: Right. So guilds can serve different purposes, but I think the point you're making, and I want to hear how you design guilds this way, excuse me, corporations this way, is that when there's real danger and people need each other, you get the tightest bonds.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes, that is absolutely true. And, and there is an [00:13:00] even further accelerant to that. When the danger is a group of other humans, it gets even more intense. You can achieve that in kind of a PVE setting, and it does achieve, get achieved in EVE Online. But the fact that there are other humans there out to get you really starts to put pressure on the trust that people have amongst each other.
And there's maybe a good story where this kind of became very, very solidified in our minds. So when we, when we make Game Online, we use a procedural generation sort of universe creation script that the lead game designer, Kertan Pierre, had created. He has a PhD in chaos physics. So he has created an elaborate system that created something, which was basically a Big Bang simulation that created roughly 7,000 solar systems.
That were in EVE when it comes out and then creates [00:14:00] all the suns, all the planets, all the asteroid fields, uh, all the stations, all these things is generated by this script and, and Cartan and others have meticulously calculated what it would take for a spaceship to go to an asteroid field, back to a space station, size of the cargo hold, the, the frequency and volume it could mine.
And then we had made out of that. The very elaborate Excel sheet, a way to calculate the content progression or the estimated content progression, how long it would take people to go from frigates to cruisers, to battleships, because those were the ship classes we, we had, and we wanted people to take years to go from frigates to battleships.
Then the, the game happens, people start playing and, and we are kind of busy fixing bugs, making sure the servers are running and. And, and doing a lot of just sort of last minute development because the game wasn't really fully baked when he released it. So we [00:15:00] are kind of just distracted by that and not really following with great detail on what's really going on in the game.
Then I actually, I go on paternity leave in September that year. And there was a lot of downtime. We were having our first baby and, and, and there's a lot of time where the mother is sleeping and the baby is sleeping and you're kind of, you know, You have to be there in case something happens. So I actually start playing game online to figure out what's going on.
And that's where I learn about this aspect that DeepPlayers have created, where they basically ruined all our game design about like how content progression was supposed to take place. They have used the debugging feature in the game, which basically allows you to jack this on a cargo container into space.
And this was really just a debugging feature. This wasn't a part of the game design at all, but it was there. And the cargo container would, would stay in space for one hour and then it would disappear. And the cargo container was very big. So, people had found that if they [00:16:00] put out the cargo container and then where everyone was mining into the cargo container, then you could have a hauler that could come to the cargo container, take the collected mining and go back to the station.
And then, uh, orders of magnitude increased through sort of flexible organization of this kind of mining outfit, how much minerals they could mine on a, on a given day, because everyone could kind of specialize in mining. They were mining all the time, never had to fly back. And the hauler could fly back.
With the, with the proceeds and whatnot. And we like saw this and like, Oh my God, all the content progression is broken. We have to take out this feature, et cetera. But thankfully we have the wisdom to take a look, take a look at it a bit closer. And there's a very interesting trust dynamic that needs to be in place for this to work.
One, the cargo container is, is open for grabs for anyone. So a rogue player could come and just steal the proceeds collectively without having been a part of the mining outfit. So somebody has to [00:17:00] defend against a rogue player coming in and stealing it. You really have to trust the one who's doing the hauling because the one who's doing the hauling is taking maybe an hour's worth of work from 10 to 20 people, which is very valuable.
So we have to trust that they honor the social contract of delivering the goods and then distributing the, the, the results. So this has a lot of kind of shared social understanding and trust to work. There is no facility in the game to guarantee that the loose it distributed. There's no facility in the game to lock out people that can't go into the cargo container, et cetera.
So everyone has to trust each other. And that becomes the foundation of relationship building, because if you are taking a risk on other people and that they are gonna do what they say and say what they do, that is kind of the, the foundation of, of building trustworthy relationships. So we thankfully didn't remove this feature, but we started to look at a lot of the [00:18:00] other aspects of the game.
Where are we overly guaranteeing outcomes versus relying on people to cooperate together in a, in a flexible way, built on trust.
Amy: That's such a good story. That's emergent role playing.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes, it absolutely is. What I would call kind of the digital physics of the game. So people were able to take tools, which in this case were actually debugging tools and use them for other purposes so they could like compose a new way to do things that we hadn't thought about and that became theirs.
So this kind of composability of tools and foundations of the game really allows for this kind of social innovation to, to achieve things in a more efficient way.
Amy: Composability of tools, plus foundation of like the systems foundation of the game.[00:19:00]
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes.
Amy: Can you just flesh that out a little bit? Not all the details, but like the basics, how did those work together? Cause that's, I mean, this is amazing.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yeah, so, uh, so composability, maybe if we take a simpler game like Minecraft. So when you sort of organize resources into the window where you can on the, on the kind of crafting bench and those things, and you kind of put wood in pickaxe and you make a pick, that is an example of composability.
Like you can chop trees to get wood. You can, you can mine to get diamonds. If you take wood and diamonds, you can make a diamond pickaxe by organizing it in a certain way inside the window. So you have a lot of flexibility on how you want to achieve that. You can distribute throughout the work order.
Somebody goes and takes care of the diamonds. Somebody goes and takes care of the wood and somebody is really good executing the, the, the crafting. And it's even [00:20:00] a bit wonderful with Minecraft. I don't think the recipes were ever published out. So people are in a way, inventing the recipes. This is a very beautiful way of, of not only having composability, but also a form of tech innovation where people are discovering new patterns.
And how to arrange things in the, in the kind of crafting with, so you can take that little example from Minecraft, which is a very beautiful example, very elegantly done. And then when you spread that over like tens of different minerals, hundreds of different spaceships, Stargate, space stations, thousands of solar systems, hundreds of thousands of people.
All trying to invent new ways to be more efficient at making things. That is kind of like composability mixed with flexible organizational scale, kind of Yuval Harari, Sapien style, and all built on this foundation that there is. Kind of like digital physics [00:21:00] underneath where like conservation laws are adhered to, et cetera, where, where it kind of looks familiar to the nature we already live in, even if it is obviously vastly simplified in games like Minecraft and Yellowmine.
Amy: Right. So another way I'm understanding what you're saying, tell me if I have this right. Is that there's a certain sandbox element to EVE Online.
Hilmar Pétursson: You could absolutely call this a sandbox. And, and, and in some umbrella sense, you, you, you could say these are aspects of sandbox games, but the deeper you go into this notion, which is as I call it, and many to call it digital physics.
Where you have these things, you can take these things, you can combine them together. They make a new thing. Then you can uncombine them and get something back. Then you have kind of resource economies that are very familiar to us. We know how to [00:22:00] mine for gold. We know how to take gold and make a ring.
And we know how to find the diamond and put the diamond on the ring. And now we have a diamond ring. And you know that you can also decompose it if it goes out of fashion or you can make something else out of those components. And as soon as you put humans. Into a world that has coherence on this level, then the mind starts to problem solve of how can I organize my workforce in my corporation to be better at building these type of ships, these type of modules, how can I then use the ships I've now built through my better logistics to go and acquire more territory?
How can I use the trust I have within my organization to protect that territory against others? How can I make strategic alliances with other neighbors or not neighbors, uh, close to me so that together we are stronger, et cetera. And if you get this right, then you have kind of what we have in EVE Online, which is something we refer to as [00:23:00] the infinitely scalable storytelling engine.
Is that the story of each and individual person in this domain becomes their story. It's not our story as the developer of the game. Because we just made the ingredient. The adventures were made by the players themselves because they invented their own way to play the game.
Amy: So let's talk a little more about story.
So that's, that's, you know, set and setting and it, um, you said something really important about gaming economies, which is about the mental model that the gaming economy builds in the player's head. And that being coherent, is a key toward people engaging in it and optimizing along certain lines. Yes?
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes.
Amy: Yes. So that, and that's important because you can get lost in a lot of things about gaming economies, but if it doesn't engage with us in a way we understand and can [00:24:00] extrapolate from no matter what, it's not going to work.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yeah. So there is a, there is actually a, a huge challenge with creating gaming economies which is that most studies we do on economic activity in the, in our world is an immor, is an emergent property of the nature we live in.
It is a, it is a property of like we live on earth. Earth has certain topology, certain distribution of resources, et cetera. It has cost to acquire those resources, cost to refine them, cost to assemble them, et cetera. And often when you think of game economies, you often get economists think about how to make game economies.
But the, the, the first step is usually forgotten is like, how do you create nature? Because first you have to create the nature of your world of what are the resources of them? Why [00:25:00] are they there? What's the story of them being there? And what is all that poetry underneath? Because those become the inputs into what will be an emergent property, which is your game economy.
So you actually don't create. A game economy, you create the foundations underneath, and then you get players into that, those foundations and they create the economy. So often people start by creating an economy, but an economy is an emergent function of social behaviors of humans interacting and it's theirs.
So you need to first create nature and then mostly let it go. When you try to create an economy. You've created, um, a static construct that nobody really owns or loves and isn't theirs. They are just a raft in a maze that you have already thought everything through. And the magic happens when you really focus on creating the, the nature underneath or the digital [00:26:00] physics, which is also a good word for it.
And then allow the players to create the emergent property that is the economy on top of it.
Amy: I think you just partially answered the question of Why Eve has such long term retention and why it's been around for so long and still has what? Hundreds of thousands of live players?
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes, yeah.
Amy: I mean, that's astonishing.
It really is. But if you think about gaming economies in, say, the history of free to play gaming. You, in fact, are part of that history. But most free to play games come and go. Farmville is no longer around. It was a big phenomenon. And part of that is that the economies are basically a squeeze.
Hilmar Pétursson: So most free to play games are single player progression games with very little open trading involved.
There are very few games that have open [00:27:00] trading systems. You can usually look at really any, any, any multiplayer game. Is there an open ability for people to trade on a, on a marketplace where nobody really manages anything? It's just people putting. It's an asks into a matchmaking engine, a very few games have that.
We have obviously taken that very far. And we also have the benefit of the game being single shard. So there aren't, so it's one large economy that is the emergent property. But usually if you look at your typical free to play multiplayer game, there isn't really any trading involved. There's maybe limited gifting and, and, and that is practiced to some extent.
And the reason why it is like that is that. It's very well understood how you monetize a single player progression system. It is, well, it's also well understood how you monetize trading, trading economy, mainly do it through taxation of the, of the trades that [00:28:00] take place. How, how does NASDAQ operate? Well, they pinch every little trade a little bit and that's how they make their money.
How does the government operate? Well, they have sales tax or, or VAT tax. And every single transaction in the economy is kind of pinched a bit, kind of mostly how, how governments make their money. They also tax salaries, which you could argue is a pretty poor way of doing it. Now that we have computers and whatnot, it would be.
Much better to, to gain it through transaction tax. And, and this is very hard to do. Like I, I can absolutely appreciate that sometimes people just take the easier, simpler way and just do it as a single player progression with sort of time accelerant monetization. I mean, we have sometimes even resorted to some of that.
I mean, that's one of the tools you have in your toolbox, but, uh, but there is so much more. I think the beauty of Evernline comes from the fact that it is an emergent Economy created by players where they can freely trade amongst each other through [00:29:00] fairly robust systems we have provided.
Amy: So you've mentioned two really big themes, robust underlying systems, which I'm sure you've evolved tremendously over time, and then an open endedness to allow for emergent phenomenon.
So this has been going on now for a couple of decades. And you've mentioned how you responded to emergent phenomena, meaning players using the tools in ways you didn't expect.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes.
Amy: And, It was like, oh, wait a minute, let's not clamp down on that. You also talked about this as a storytelling engine, but it's not capital S storytelling.
There is a backstory, there is a setting, right, to sort of propel it. So what kinds of emergent phenomena, including stories. What are some of the other ones [00:30:00] that you've seen? You told us one great story already. And then like how you responded to it, because that really seems like it's part of the magic here and part of the complexity.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yeah. So I, I think we're up to two stories now. One was the story of Plex, which again was invented by players and we kind of, Formalize that. Number two was using the debug feature of cargo containers to kind of ruin our content progression. The third story, which is relevant is, is, so in 2004, we are actually a kind of hitting a stride with EVE.
2003 was very difficult for us. We had shipped the game. It wasn't really ready. We spent six months patching it up a lot. We also had made the deal with a publisher that kind of closed down their publishing operations in the middle of it. So the game was box distribution only, and there were only 30,000 boxes in channel.
And we found a way to make a, a new kind of buy back the rights. And we kind of started to release the game digitally. [00:31:00] So you could just download it online from a website, which was quite novel in 2004. Most games were delivered on CD ROMs. And as soon as we got that, the game started growing. We were kind of having 40,000 people play the game, which was almost enough to run the company.
So, and, and we're growing every day, a little bit, a few hundred people are coming in and they're sticking with it. So we are, we are, we are seeing brighter times ahead after having had a rather torturous four years before making the game where we ran out of money several times, didn't pay salaries for up to six months and God knows what.
Anyway, so we're feeling pretty good about it. Then an event occurs where they had joined on one of the established corporations inside the game, gained the trust of the members, moved to the top ranking position in the, in the corporation, gained all the keys to all the, to all the hangers and all the wallets and whatnot, and stole everything and run away with the money [00:32:00] and, and everything was up in flames.
And in a havoc over it, there were the players who were wronged. And there was hundreds of people. They really wanted us to kind of roll it back to undo it. And the player, people inside the company also wanted to do it because a few hundred people, a corporation was a massive thing for us back then we were eking into profitability.
So. Losing that would mean the difference between profit and loss. And we reviewed it and there were no like exploits. There were no kind of bugs involved. There was really only just lies and, and, and scamming going on. And we took the view of like, it's not ours. To regulate trust in this economy, it's ours to regulate the, the nature and kind of the physics profit properties of it, but not the social emergence property, at least not to directly intervene.
Maybe we'll have to improve systems and tools so that [00:33:00] there will be less of that in the future, but at least nobody really. broke any, any rule as defined of the game as we understand it. So we said, we're going to do nothing. This is just allowed. Don't believe everything that people tell you. And if you do, you suffer the consequences.
And the 500 people in this corporation, they all quit and the company is now losing money. And again, there was uproar, like we have to undo it. We have to change our mind. We, we can't have this happen. Like the game can't run like that. And we just stuck to our guns and, and it was really tough. I mean, the, we had to really tighten the belt to be able to run the company.
Uh, and then a few months later, PC Gamer wrote an eight page article about this called, uh, I think it's called, it was either called Murder Incorporated or The Great Heist back in 2004. And 5,000 people joined the game once they have read the article. And we are [00:34:00] now in, uh, really in the, in the, in the green once they joined.
So that was kind of a, I think a bit of a test from email line itself. How serious are we about?
Amy: Wow. That's an amazing story. Yeah, that's the real issue of governance and consistency.
Hilmar Pétursson: Absolutely. And, and these were tough calls. I mean, they're easy now in hindsight because they turned out well, but it was not easy when we were making them.
They, they were, this was so unprecedented. There, there's, there was no kind of script to go by. We, we really just had to make it up as we went along. And, and with these calls and these moments is kind of when the game was created. Yeah. Like, the development of the game, making polygons, 3D engines, server technology, game designs and all that, before players really came in and wreaked havoc.
That was just kind of [00:35:00] a, uh, a warmup the, the real game was made through these moments where, where we kind of allowed what players were doing to happen. We did, of course, prune some of the things. I mean, if it's a, you think of it like a garden, there are, there are sometimes you do have to step in, especially in the, in the beginning, but the less, the better, and, and the more you have people kind of implement their own accountability systems within the game, the better.
Amy: Well, it all goes back to building trust.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yes, absolutely. And, and, and I think when. Players started to trust the fact that we would not intervene. That was when the true magic of EVE Online started to happen.
Amy: Well, thank you for bringing EVE into the world and touching all those people and sharing everything with us today.
I know it's late your time, so thank you for staying up and giving us some of your personal time, Hilmar.
Hilmar Pétursson: Yeah, no problem. It was a lot of [00:36:00] fun. Thank you for inviting me.
Amy: Awesome. Talk to you soon.
Hilmar Pétursson: Bye-Bye.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim. The shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.
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