CCP Games to Build EVE Frontier on Sui, Pushing MMOs On-Chain
CCP Games, the studio behind EVE Online, has announced that its next-generation space survival MMO, EVE Frontier, will be built on the Sui blockchain, a move the studio says is central to its vision of a truly player-defined, persistent universe. By leveraging Sui’s object-centric architecture, CCP aims to model tens of thousands of star systems, innumerable player-built ships and evolving infrastructure in a way that keeps every player action verifiable and persistent.
For CCP, the choice of Sui isn’t merely about putting assets on-chain; it’s about scale and fidelity. Sui’s design, built for sub-second finality and high throughput, is presented as a way to support billions of player interactions in a living world without sacrificing performance. That architecture, CCP says, aligns neatly with the studio’s long-standing item-centric design philosophy and opens the door to a vastly more composable MMO experience where player creations meaningfully reshape the cosmos.
The partnership goes beyond the base blockchain. CCP will also use Mysten Labs’ full stack of decentralized tools, including Walrus, a developer platform for trustworthy data, and Seal, which provides native data access controls. “Much of Sui’s early design was shaped by the needs of high-performance games with full programmability for players,” said Sam Blackshear, co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs, the original contributors to Sui. “EVE Frontier is the first game to leverage all of the novel features that Sui, Walrus, and Seal offer. We’re inspired by CCP Games’ vision to build a truly player-defined game that outlasts its creators. It’s a perfect match for the technical ambition of Sui.”
A headline feature in EVE Frontier will be “Smart Assemblies,” a system that allows players and third-party developers to build and deploy programmable structures and systems at scale. CCP stresses that Sui’s security model is critical here: these programmable creations will exist safely in a shared universe, with their provenance preserved as part of the game’s history. That promise of secure, moddable content aims to extend the kind of emergent, player-driven narratives that made EVE Online famous into a new era where creations are both persistent and verifiable.
Pushing the Ambition Further
CCP is already in the process of porting its Founder Access build of EVE Frontier to Sui, integrating features like zkLogin for native account abstraction and Sponsored Transactions to streamline on-chain interactions. These integrations are designed to make onboarding easier for players while enabling billions of player-driven interactions to be recorded on-chain without friction.
“Since inception, our mission has been to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life. With EVE Frontier, we are pushing that ambition further than ever before: building a player moddable universe, bound by its own digital physics, that can outlive us all,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. “As we dug into how Sui is architected, we came across so many familiar concepts, such as how their object-centric approach neatly matches our historic item-centric approach, enabling billions of objects/items, all placed by players, shaping a living universe. For us, Sui offered the unique alignment of architecture, security, and user experience. Together, we’re building a world that can truly stand the test of time.”
The announcement signals a broader experiment in how large-scale, player-driven worlds can operate onchain. By making ships, structures and systems verifiable and truly owned, CCP and Sui are betting that on-chain infrastructure built for speed, composability and secure data access can support emergent economies and social systems at MMO scale. If successful, EVE Frontier could become a test case for how mainstream games incorporate decentralized primitives without compromising the scale and performance players expect.
As CCP continues development, the coming months will reveal how the technical promises translate into player experience: how smoothly onboarding works, how secure and practical programmable player content proves to be, and whether a living universe running at blockchain scale can sustain the kinds of emergent stories that defined EVE Online. For now, the partnership marks a clear statement of intent, a major studio placing its bet on a stack of blockchain technologies in pursuit of a player-empowered future for MMOs.