Google DeepMind expands its AI research partnership with EVE Online's developer

Google DeepMind published a retrospective on 15 years of games-based AI research that set out new research aims for its partnership with the developer of EVE Online, a long-running persistent multiplayer space simulation. The studio — known as CCP Games until it became independent of Pearl Abyss and rebranded as Fenris Creations in May 2026, when DeepMind took a minority stake and the research collaboration began — was described as a demanding testbed because its single persistent world runs continuously, shaped by thousands of real players making long-term economic and political decisions.

The post named four capabilities the collaboration targets: continual learning without forgetting earlier skills, memory that accumulates over long timescales, planning across weeks or months rather than single episodes, and multi-agent dynamics covering cooperation, competition and negotiation. The work builds on SIMA 2, DeepMind’s Gemini-based generalist game agent, which the companies said they were testing across EVE environments at different levels of abstraction, from an offline version running on local servers up to the live game.

One product of the collaboration had already shipped: Aura Guidance, an in-game assistant that uses Gemini to turn real player-written questions and answers from the game’s community help channels into personalised tips for new players, without any change to the game’s own code. DeepMind presented it as an early, concrete result from research aims that are otherwise long-term — the harder capabilities the partnership targets, such as multi-month strategic planning, remain research goals rather than shipped features.