I love Starship Troopers.
Petursson is hardly the first person to profess an affection for Paul Verhoevens cult military satire.
But he is one of the few with command of his own company of science fiction game developers.
In London, we are doing an upcoming online tactical first-person shooter, he said.
The project is unannounced.
Fleet does the flying, marines do the dying.
Realising its mistake,CCP scrapped Novaand has opted for a third way.
Your reading of the tea leaves is basically spot on, Petursson says.
Dust was overambitious and broad, tried to achieve many things, compromised on some of them.
Nova was very focused, perhaps too focused.
It didnt really seem like it was going to be a project that we wanted to carry further.
Maybe this one is somewhere in the middle.
The move that Petursson alludes to is significant.
Dust and Project Nova were both developed at CCPs studio in Shanghai.
It was mainly a talent pool thing, Petursson says.
Our Shanghai studio is much more excited about mobile than they are about PC.
Its really born from their desire to become a mobile expertise centre for CCP, Petursson says.
London, Petursson reckons, is an ideal spot to build the new FPS.
For starters, its just a couple of hours from CCPs Icelandic homeland, by plane.
Its competitive, but there are a lot of people in London to hire, Petursson says.
Getting people to relocate to London is pretty trivial.
Americans are very up for moving.
Its been a big project internally, Petursson says.
So its time to open up the kimono a little bit, while the project isnt formally announced.
Theres no name associated with it, not even a codename - its just the London Project.
Onstage, Petursson revealed that 63% of CCP employees today joined since the last Fanfest, in 2018.
But the growth of the London studio comes in the wake of a painful contraction for CCP.
Then there was this point in time where you could see the adoption really slowing down, Petursson says.
It seemed like, by mid-year 2017, everyone that wanted a VR set had acquired one.
We took a hard look and said, OK,we have to take a break.
We could have done tiny games, but we felt it was cleaner to take a formal vacation.
So wemade some difficult changesaround that.
But the Sparc team in Atlanta simply ceased to be.
It was a damn shame, Petursson says.
They were quite far from the overall CCP setup, and we needed to consolidate.
Something had to give.
I wish it were different.
The team was phenomenal, and the work shows in Sparc.
The grand VR experiment didnt hurt CCP as a business.
If you look at the whole thing, then it was OK, Petursson says.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
We got in at the right time, but got out at the right time.
Maybe well be in a place where the VR market is a very viable one, he says.
In the meantime, its back to Starship Troopers.
Its not science fantasy, head of PR George Kelion says.
Its not laser swords.
And I like that science fiction where were both our own saviours and our own downfall.
We have it in us.
We wanna get in there.
