Jon Bellamy, CEO of Jagex has promised that “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.” in an interview with TheGameBusiness.
This was part of the discussion where he was talking about the tough calls taken on reducing monetization (Treasure Hunt micro-transaction, which gave XP and gold boosts was removed – a high revenue-earning, but as it’s easy to imagine, unpopular across the RuneScape gaming community) in the game; which has helped stabilize membership, but impacted revenue negatively.
Among other interesting things shared in the discussion, was the observation that half of the RuneScape’s active audience has never played a RuneScape game before, and the reason for this, according to Bellamy, was a resurgence of the late 90s, “a collective nostalgia for the simpler things before all the madness of social media”.
Among other things, was the wild range by which the developers own sales targets were overachieved – the developers had estimated a sale of 200k units in Early Access, which, ended up more in the range of 1.3 million – almost 7 times the plan. The acceptance of RuneScape in the eastern part of the world – in particular southeast Asia and China were something of a surprise to the developers since the game, they assumed, what with all the Monty Pythonesque humor, would remain largely centered around the Western audiences.
The ambitions, and the plans for RuneScape sit pretty high, with an intent to make the game bigger than World of Warcraft – as the number 1 MMO globally.
It is quite gratifying to see a game in early access have the kind of numbers that it has enjoyed, and the devs look to be taking the game in the right direction – with removal of micro-transactions, and all this with the ambitious plans put out, means that RuneScape fans should have quite a few things to look forward to, especially, as the devs have promised, around RuneFest.
