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In This Edition,
Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy on…
Taking on World of Warcraft
Old School’s surprising fanbase
The ‘pain’ of changing monetization
The console opportunity
Winning China
There’s a complaint on the RuneScape subreddit about a graphical bug.
There’s a fence that has impaled the edge of a barrel. It’s a pretty minor issue. Nevertheless, one person on that subreddit has made it their mission to get it fixed.
“He made a post every day saying: ‘Day 112 of waiting for this barrel to be fixed,’” says Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy.
“So, I sat with one of the lead designers and I asked, ‘Look, I’ve seen this Reddit post for the last 129 days. Are we going to do something?’ And he said, ‘What if we moved it further into the fence?’ I said, ‘That’s such a good idea.’ We then spent about a half a year moving it an inch further into the fence every day, and this guy responded every day with ‘day 400 of waiting for this stupid barrel thing to be over’.
“Now it is out of the fence with a hole where the fence was, leaking water forevermore. I think that playfulness is really who we are at our best. It makes this place turn over. It makes players happy.”
I enjoyed that story. Not only does it showcase the distinctive British whimsy that’s made RuneScape famous, but it also highlights how engaged Bellamy is with the franchise. He’s on the subreddits, he’s religiously playing the game (he was fishing in Old School RuneScape before our interview), and he’s at all the events (signing babies!).
And Jagex is RuneScape. There’s no other IP. No third-party publishing. It’s rebranded itself as Jagex: The RuneScape Company, and sold off its one non-RuneScape game, Scum, alongside its developer, Gamepires, to fellow UK studio Splash Damage.
“Never say never,” Bellamy says. “But I have no intention of going beyond RuneScape with this business.
“Our team size is less because we have fewer studios and products, but focus is through the roof. It’s really liberating to be able to do one thing better than anybody else in the world.”
“It’s really liberating to do one thing better than anybody else in the world”
That focus has manifested itself into three goals: Turn around its declining RuneScape MMO, invest heavily in the successful Old School RuneScape product, and fully release the survival game RuneScape: Dragonwilds.
We spoke to Bellamy about all this at Jagex’s offices in Cambridge, UK. And you can watch the full interview above (it’s a good one). Or check out the selected highlights below.
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Jagex wants RuneScape to be the world’s No.1 MMO brand
RuneScape is the second biggest MMO brand globally, Jagex claims.
There’s bound to be debate over how you measure ‘biggest’, or indeed what is classed as an MMO, but regardless, Jagex sees itself as No.2, and it has its sights set on No.1: World of Waracraft.
“The dream is that we’re not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world,” says Bellamy. “We’re number one. There’s a big old gap between us and number one, but if we get it right, we know we can make headway. It’s lofty and ambitious, but if you’re going to set lofty and ambitious goals, why not swing for the top? So, that’s the number one goal.”
RuneScape monetization changes have stopped the decline (but it’s been painful)
Last year, Jagex changed how it monetizes RuneScape. It removed the unpopular (but lucrative) Treasure Hunter microtransaction, which gave players XP boosts, gold and gameplay-skipping items.
We spoke to Bellamy last year, who admitted that the company would likely take a financial hit by doing this, but change was necessary to get RuneScape back to growth.
Nine months later, has the company taken a financial hit? And have players come back?
“It has impacted revenue, not positively,” he says. “RuneScape revenue is down quite a large chunk. The reason why I took [this decision], the reason why we got the backing above me, is because I don’t think there was [any other] legitimate way to reset the standards for the game that would allow us to have a shot at coming back to growth. It has been painful, exactly as we thought it would be.”
Bellamy says that membership has stabilized for the first time in nearly four years, but user growth will require more than just changing monetization.
“Setting the table for growth is not the same as expecting growth to come as a result of setting the table. You need to put something on the table to bring people in. We’ve set the table, we’ve spent the last year not just removing that monetization layer, but overhauling so much of the clunkiness and the pain within the game.
“The guy who runs our RuneScape studio has been here for 13 years. He’s been a RuneScape player for 20. The person calling the shots on how to bring this thing back to life was a player in its golden age. He’s done a great job on getting the game into a healthy position. So less daily, less FOMO, less of the rubbish.
“I’ve been told very clearly not to give anything away, but on October 3 at RuneFest, we’ll be announcing our equivalent of putting a feast on the table, to really actively win people back, and that’ll be happening much sooner than many people expect.”
It may be retro, but half of Old School RuneScape players are new to the series
The core RuneScape game may be having a tough time, but the reverse is true of Old School RuneScape. “We broke just about every record we’ve ever had across every major metric in the last 12 months, and multiple times,” Bellamy says.
The retro version of RuneScape (it’s based on the 2007 version of the game) is growing, and Jagex will invest a further £200 million to turn it “into a stalwart product rather than a scrappy underdog.”
And it’s not just for older fans, either. In fact, half of Old School RuneScape’s active audience had never played a RuneScape game before.
“They’ve chosen to play the 2007 version as their first RuneScape experience,” Bellamy explains. “I think most people assume that this is something for the old-timers who’ve always been here. It’s not true. It stands alone.”
Why does he think that is?
“The easy answer is it’s great. But I think it’s a bit like some of the metal bands from the late ‘90s. You’re starting to see the Kylie Jenners of the world wearing Iron Maiden and Metallica T-shirts, and there’s a bunch of kids that I see that have no idea what Metallica is, but they love the font and think it’s a cool shirt. I have mixed feelings about that, but there is a bit of a resurgence, and we have that same feeling a bit with Old School.
“We have captured a portion of time that even those who weren’t there in their formative teenage years still long for. There’s a collective nostalgia for the simpler days before all the madness of social media.”
The game has even shown up in a new music video from artist Phoebe Bridgers.
“It’s like a real cross-cultural moment where in the middle of this like super poppy, very zeitgeisty music video, there’s a guy in a gas station playing Old School RuneScape,” Bellamy says. “It so well encapsulates what Old School is for so many people.”
Runescape: Dragonwilds is on 1.3 million sales and doing well in China
The third game in the RuneScape franchise is the survival game Dragonwilds, which launched into Early Access last year.
“We thought it was going to sell about 200,000 units in Early Access. We’re at about 1.3 million,” Bellamy says. “Since the beginning of this month, we’ve sold about another 100,000.”
That boost follows the game’s launch in Southeast Asia, including a version for Chinese players.
“RuneScape had zero presence in those countries. And part of that is because of what we make. [Our games have this] Monty Python-style, very British humor. It resonates really well in Finland. It resonates very well in Japan, as we’ve recently learned. It resonates very well in the Netherlands and the US. It’s very Western-centric. Or at least that’s what we’d assumed. And then we release a product in China for the first time, and in our first week following the release, 41% of sales have been to Chinese buyers. And since then, it’s evened out at about 15% to 20% a day.”
“So, maybe our long-held suspicions about cultural fit aren’t as true as we thought.”
Jagex thinks there’s 12 million former RuneScape players on Nintendo Switch
Dragonwilds will launch on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo when it exits Early Access in September. It will be the first RuneScape game to ever launch on consoles.
“It’s a testing what we’ve always assumed to be not right for us,” he says. “Over the last 25 years, somebody somewhere looked at consoles, said it wasn’t going to be possible, probably not even worth it, and the upside isn’t that much. And that has just hung around in the walls of this place. This is our first legitimate ‘we’re actually going to do this thing’ moment. A new RuneScape product, tons of resource invested, tons of time invested, tons of heart. We’re going to bring it to new platforms where historically we’ve never been, and therefore it will be hard to get off the ground.
“We’ve done some numbers on this. We think there’s about six million of our historical players on each of the main platforms, so Xbox and PlayStation, and then about twice that on Switch. So, when we’ve been speaking with the platforms, I’ve been saying, ‘Look, you don’t need to create an audience for us. We have one. They’re there. Let’s bring them a game.’”
‘It’s not worth worrying about rising console prices and GTA 6’
Jagex faces a few challenges with Dragonwilds. It’s coming to consoles at a time when that sector is facing severe headwinds due to rising prices.
It also launches in a hyper congested September as publishers seek to avoid the launch of GTA 6 in November.
“September is congested, and yes, we’ll have to fight for our place,” Bellamy says. “But it is genuinely very good, and secondarily, we have this unique advantage of 300 million RuneScape players that we can really lean in on. That helps to de-risk a bit. But you’d be foolish to say that it isn’t harder today than it was six months ago.”
He continues: “It’s a control the controllables thing. I speak with my Board and my team and say, ‘Look, some of our expectations might need to shift a bit because GTA is launching in November. Everybody else is launching in September. Console prices are going through the roof. There’s a bunch of things changing around us that we can’t control.’
“Our job is to come to the places where players are, do our very best interpretation of giving them what they want, and carry on. The rest of it that is outside of our control isn’t really worth worrying about.”
Thank you for reading! We’ll be back Thursday with a special edition of The Game Business featuring Amazon. You won’t want to miss it.
