CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson delivered a speech at the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) 2007 and part of it focused on the difference between World of Warcraft's "themepark" approach to the MMORPG genre and Eve Online's playground structure. He also talked about how their company was already there when the genre wasn't fully formed yet.

"We began full-force in 2000 by raising US$ 3 million, which is about one-tenth of the current MMORPG. The last year of which we had no money, but everyone turned up to work anyway despite us not being able to pay them. This created a core of people who have gone through hell with us, and helps with the community especially," explained the CEO.

On to the juicier part, Petursson reminisced how Eve Online started as an MMO video game but looking at it now, it is more of a virtual society or the console platform's sandbox genre. While acknowledging that WoW is a good game, the CEO hinted though that Blizzard is not giving its user base the chance to "play" and "explore".

According to the official, this is not even about giving the players complex tools to tinker with because the players themselves will eventually come up with "complex in-game behaviors" as long as they understand the tools at work in the game. He added:

When people play, they are doing something social and its inherently competitively social, which allows you to hone and develop skills which are applicable to real life: incentive plans for employees, using PR to take down your enemy, manage complex logistics, and so on.

Lastly, Hilmar Petursson reminded everyone that it's about time MMO developers give back the power to the hands of the players. "We are now in a big effort to decentralize governance of the world. We want to employ democratic elections to elect representatives to have an ongoing say in development," he added.