YGG Play Summit: Fostering Onchain Economies for a Borderless Future

CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson joined Sovrun founder and CEO Renz Chong for a fireside chat about how and why EVE Online is entering Web3.

The YGG Play Summit drew members of the global gaming community to the Philippines, including leaders with long-standing legacies in Web2 gaming like CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. For EVE Online fans in attendance, Hilmar’s keynote and his fireside chat with Sovrun (formerly BreederDAO) founder and CEO Renz Chong proved to be some of the event’s biggest highlights. Sovrun won an online hackathon hosted by CCP Games in June 2024, earning a place in the developer’s growing Web3-native talent pool.

With more than 20 years experience designing, building and running one of the biggest, most active and most robust player-driven economies of all time, CCP Games is slated to enter the Metaverse with its upcoming title, EVE Frontier. During the fireside chat, Hilmar stressed that building CCP Games’ latest project onchain was a deliberate choice, highlighting how Web3 empowers people to generate economic value from virtual worlds, regardless of their geographic location.

The following is an excerpt from Hilmar and Renz’s chat, where Hilmar compares the Philippines’ massive Web3 adoption to how quickly Iceland embraced the internet and connected with the rest of the world. He also praises the talent in the Philippines, citing Web3 as one of the best routes Filipinos can take to share their abilities on a global scale.

Listen to the full recording on YouTube.

YGG Play Summit: A New Meta for Fully Onchain Economies

Renz (5:12): I would say the general Philippine population is always on the hunt for other opportunities. It’s precisely why 11% of Filipinos are Overseas Filipino workers. They actually go abroad for opportunities.

Recently, Emfarsis, YGG and team coined the term Metaverse Filipino Worker, where now, instead of going physically to other places, you can find these opportunities within the digital space. Now, a lot of games, or even Metaverse experiences, do not really champion this. Do you imagine that, eventually, you guys will pave a path towards more and more games or worlds venturing into this kind of setup? What is your vision as a whole for the industry?

Hilmar (6:00): So if we go back to my home country, Iceland, it’s an island in the middle of the Atlantic. It's very expensive to go to and from Iceland and export things into and out of Iceland. When the internet came, it was like a huge liberation for Iceland, because now Iceland can make things that don't have to go on a plane or a ship, which is very expensive, and that created a big internet boom in Iceland.

We are a product of that. EVE Online literally would never be made if it weren't for the internet, and it never would have been made in Iceland if it weren't for the internet. So what you are describing here is a bit of a similar situation. A person in the Philippines has a certain amount of agency in the Philippines, but if you add the internet on top of it, what you can do is now on a global scale.

Then you have to find what you can really do. And as you were saying, a lot of people, 11% of the population, are working kind of remote, for probably mostly Western companies. But now we are building an experience where you can be working in space from the Philippines, building amazing things in space for the whole planet. And not only that, but you can also build the business model around it. So this was kind of a fantasy — until you guys came and just made it real.

You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.

Follow Hilmar and Renz to learn more about EVE Frontier’s upcoming autonomous worlds.

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