EVE Frontier is about to roll out a series of economic updates, and they’re being led by none other than an Icelandic economist. CCP Games, the studio behind EVE Online, has brought on Icelandic economist Stefán Þórarinsson as its new head of economy. The idea is to help the studio achieve its dreams of having a truly open financial system within a virtual world.

Stefán will work with the team to fine-tune the in-game player economies for EVE Frontier, making sure the system gets the same careful, real-world-style analysis. As CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson put it, “His appointment advances our goal toward building a truly open financial system within a virtual world. By removing currency controls and fostering emergent value systems, EVE Frontier will redefine virtual nation-building, offering insights into both digital and real-world economies.”

Stefán himself added, “Virtual economies are living, evolving systems that demand serious study. We aim not just to simulate a wide variety of economic activity but to study, refine, and validate how virtual economies function at scale; EVE Frontier will set the standard for how these systems can be structured, regulated, and understood.”

EVE Online’s economy has always been largely player-driven, operating on supply and demand. Back in 2007, CCP hired economist Eyjólfur Guðmundsson to oversee the game’s economy—a first for the industry. Since his departure in 2014, the hope is that Frontier and Stefán can continue that landmark work and offer even deeper insights into digital finance and decentralized economic systems.

Along with Stefán’s hiring, Frontier is getting a host of economy-related updates. The first set tackles issues like monetary inflation and gathers data on player decision-making and economic adaptation. Later updates will come through CCP’s Founder membership tier, offering a fully controlled environment to model, predict, and fine-tune how virtual economies perform under different conditions.

According to CCP, these efforts will not only shape the development of EVE Frontier but also contribute to a broader discussion on how digital economies can be examined, structured, and sustained in the future.

Eve Frontier entered Closed Alpha on December 10, 2024. To access the Closed Alpha and further pre-launch development phases, players can acquire Founder Access, giving them the ability to play on a live server that will be continuously updated till launch and beyond. The game is planned to be free-to-play with optional subscriptions upon its full launch. It is based on Eve Online, and uses the same game engine, but with significant structural enhancements.

Included in the upgrades are occlusion, which means you can now hide behind asteroids and such to avoid detection by enemy spacecraft, If you don’t have line-of-sight on a given object, you won’t see it on overview, adding stealth options to the game. This also means that it is now possible to fire on your own allies by accident if they are between you and the intended targets. Server ticks now happen four times faster for more responsive manual piloting. Accurate targeting with lower-tier weapons becomes practical. Fuel usage and management is now much more relevant, and successful missions now depend heavily on fuel management and availability. Getting stranded in space is now a real possibility.

The original online game Eve Online released in 2003.