Highlights From The EVE Fanfest 2026 Keynote

At the end of day 2 of the 2026 EVE Fanfest convention Fenris Creations (the studio formerly known as CCP Games) held its keynote presentation. I watched the presentation live and am just going to go through some of the notes I took of the approximately hour and a half session.

First, Fenris does have two mobile games related to the EVE universe, the NetEase-run EVE Echoes and the internally built EVE Galaxy Conquest. A lot of people disregard the mobile games, but they do bring in a not insignificant amount of revenue. According to the group's recently released financial accounts for 2025 Echoes probably brought in $4 million in 2025. And while no figure was given for Galaxy Conquest, cost of sales of $1.3 million lead me to believe mobile game revenue for the company was over 10% if not 15% of total game revenue. Thus, a subject to pay attention to.

EVE Echoes next expansion is titled Titan Descent. Galaxy Conquest was recently updated with pirate invasions, new ships, and a new map. Upcoming additions to GC are achievements, Gurista invasions, and relic explorations. And, like in EVE Online, the mobile game has its own player council.

Next up were player run tournaments in EVE Online. After a review of the Tuskers victory in Alliance Tournament XXI, Fenris announced host of AT XXII would be Amarr. Other player-run tournaments like Anger Gamex VII are supported by Fenris-created tools. Those tools should improve for the upcoming year's tournament season.

The EVE Partner program was mentioned, but I'm not sure exactly how much actually changed. The winners of the new content creator awards will be announced during the closing ceremonies.

Other partners besides players

I'm going to rush past the 1 billion scientific classifications EVE players have submitted over the past 10 years to Kickstarter news. Andrew Groen, the author of the Empires of EVE books, has a new project, The Archive. Covering the history of many MMORPGs besides EVE, the book has received enough support to be published. I backed the Empires of EVE books and just backed The Archive as well.

Now for the news most readers want to know: the summer expansion. Fenris Creations not only changed its name, but also the name format for EVE Online expansions. The next expansion, launching on 9 June, is Cradle of War.  The trailer wasn't too bad.

Since I started playing EVE in 2009 I've heard players wanting to include high sec in factional warfare. With Cradle of War that long held wish is coming true in the form of military campaigns. Players no longer have to engage in PvP in order to participate in FW.

Expansion highlights

FW apparently will now have an in-game interface to track the progression of the war. Each empire will always have a military campaign running for players to which players can contribute. These campaigns are built on the freelance jobs system introduced to New Eden in the Legion expansion in May 2025. 

For those wondering, all the changes planned will not show up in the CoW. The changes will take the next three expansions to implement.

Something I bet some will hate is the introduction of titles and achievements. A staple of MMORPGs not made in Iceland, I hope the system will complement the new starter space also coming in CoW. The region is known as Exordium and the 53-system region will be the first ever safe space in EVE. 

Of course, every EVE expansion must have new ships. CoW will introduce another line of faction navy destroyers and four Tech 2 Command Carriers, one for each empire. More information about the ships was promised during Saturday's EVE Online keynote address.

The next major news came from EVE Vanguard. The Vanguard devs let the world know that the game would enter alpha on 7 July with the introduction of Operation Avalon. The alpha will also launch a new map for the extraction shooter set in the EVE universe. The alpha's first playtest period will run from July 7-20 and be available on Steam. Eventually the shooter will tie into EVE Online, with Operation Avalon introducing the first economic tie-ins between the two games.

The final game presented was the debut of EVE Frontier. For those wondering who gave the presentation, that was Frontier's Creative Director FC MaximumCats. The presentation was more of an introduction to the game than anything else, with MaximumCats perhaps going a little over the top in the roleplay department. For that I blame the influence of FC Burger.

I've watched MaximumCats presentation a couple of times now. The one time people in the audience seemed really interested was the possibility of using Frontier's hyper-modularity to create their own spaceships. I have the feeling I'll want to dig into the EVE Frontier keynote scheduled to stream on Twitch at 1400 UTC. 

I don't want to go too far into some of Hilmar's takes on AI. He seemed to imply that AI programs like Deep Blue defeating Gary Kasparov and AlphaGo defeating Lee Sedol helped make the games more approachable to the general public, and more popular. If he is counting on such a thing happening with Google DeepMind's research into EVE Online, well, I think he took a wrong turn down the rabbit hole. But I can imagine Google DeepMind learning a lot of things about artificial intelligence studying EVE and its massive database of player interactions.

I didn't quite cover everything but the Fanfest keynote presentation is a general overview. The real details show up on the various keynotes covering EVE Online, EVE Vanguard, and EVE Frontier on Saturday.