How did I get here?

This is not my beautiful house!

No, I'm in the hamlet city of Reykjavik, Iceland for my first EVE Fanfest and coincidentally, my first visit to the country. I've seen the myriad pictures for the monument before, but it was fascinating to get some context around it.

Iceland is a strange place. My first real experience in the country involved getting some breakfast after a red-eye flight, only to hear the restaurant blaring 1950's rock and roll. Just up the street is a bar dedicated to Chuck Norris and any number of innocuous US pop culture references. Credit cards are widely accepted, English is widely spoken, and you can basically just roll up and acclimate instantly.

The actual 'Fest starts later today with its opening ceremonies at 1PM ET, and will hold 1,000 players and 200 developers. Like any con there's panels, hands-on booths, and general chill sessions between fans and developers. Think larger than Final Fantasy XIV's Fanfest in terms of venue space (CCP has the entire Harpa center, a gargantuan building), but smaller than say, BlizzCon. Expect a few inside baseball announcements for EVE Online, as well as some updates on their side projects like Sparc and EVE Valkyrie.

In case you're wondering how CCP is doing in general, they shared their total 2016 year end results with Destructoid in what they're calling a "record year." Record, in the sense that they snagged $86,135,976 in revenue, and $21 million of that was a profit. They're fine, to say the least. And after touring their upscale studio and seeing how they work first-hand, I can see why.

Known for their infamous nature of canceling projects that they aren't happy with, they've had very few ideas that can be considered traditional "failures" outside of Dust 514. Most of their focus is on EVE Online, but when they go outside of that arena, they go hard. Like many other studios they could have released a marquee VR game for one platform and called it a day, but Valkyrie is not only on Oculus, Vive, and PSVR, but it's cross-platform across all three. It helps that they aren't monstrously large (they're at just over 300 bodies), even if their empire spans from Atlanta, to Europe, to China (their Shanghai studio is handling their mobile VR arm).

It'll be interesting to see if they can move even further out of the lucrative but still fairly esoteric niche that's EVE Online. Let's find out together this week!

[Disclosure: Travel provided by the publisher]

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