Jagex, Britain’s largest independent studio, is celebrating the 200 millionth account to be created since the launch of Runescape Gold , its free-to-play, browser-based game in 2001.
It may not be the first name people think of when you mention massively multiplayer games, but RuneScape, from humble beginnings as a graphical multi-user dungeon at the turn of the millennium, has grown to be the biggest free-to-play online game in the world by account numbers. Jagex, its creator, has grown with it, with just over 500 employees now serving its online games.
The core of RuneScape’s appeal, along with longevity, is simplicity: the game plays in a browser, and has always been designed to do so, long predating the current vogue for browser-based gaming. It eschews story-driven gaming, letting players wander freely, fighting, questing or crafting as they wish. And, over more than a decade, it has totted up 200 million accounts – a number reached and passed today.
Of course, the market for online role playing is far more crowded now than in 2001, and increasingly both western games abandoning hopes of subscription fees and arrivals from the traditional havens of free-to-play in Japan and South Korea are squeezing the market. RuneScape has come back with technical upgrades – it is in the process of rolling out a new combat system, which will replace the current model (click to start fighting, essentially) with something more modern.
But it has also kept the system requirements for players rock-bottom, with no more installation required than a browser plugin, and keeping the complexity low enough that players can drop in and out of the game easily. Many early adopters were children who played on locked-down school computers.
The growth of online gaming, and online payments, has opened up new avenues for monetization: Jagex has introduced the Squeal of Fortune – effectively a variant on the Japanese gacha system, where a dispenser releases one random item per use – which might be rare, ultra-rare or dirt common. Free members get one spin per day, premium members two, rs 3 gold and further spins can be purchased with JCoins, Runescape’s in-game currency.
Jagex remains the biggest and one of the most profitable studios in the UK – and one which has done away with the publisher model entirely, using the browser window as its publisher. It has also, not least because its members skew young (the average age is 16), focussed on online security: its current CEO, Mark Gerhard, came from a background in IT security in the financial sector.
A RuneScape dungeon
I asked Gerhard by email about the current state of the nation – or rather, the magical land of Gielinor.