RuneScape CEO: We want to be bigger than World of Warcraft

It has been painful, exactly as we thought it would be. We do make less money now on RuneScape because of it. I have no intention of going beyond RuneScape with this business.
Okay.
Um at least while I'm here. We so much so that we changed the name of the company. About half of the active members for Old School RuneScape have joined Old School um as their first RuneScape game.
Oh, I see. It's not
They've chosen to play the 2007 version of a classic game
Huh.
as their first RuneScape experience. The dream is that we're not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world, we're the number one.
Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. This week's edition is sponsored by WeHype. It's actually quite a fitting sponsor because today's show is with Jagex, which is one of the developers releasing a game during this hyper-competitive September that's coming up. And WeHype is all about helping publishers cut through the noise and get noticed, which is of course one of the industry's biggest challenges. Now, WeHype has spent the last 10 years helping publishers find the right creators that can make the difference. It partners with tens of thousands of

creators and new voices, some of the biggest names with the goal of building collaborations that have real impact beyond reach. WeHype partners with some major companies including lots of EA and Supercell to support game launches and live service updates through sponsorships, support a creator, creator stores, and more. The company has worked on some major games this year, too, including with 007 and Hitman developer IO Interactive. For those planning their next release, why not chat to WeHype? You'll find them at [email protected]. They'll also be at Gamescom. If you'd like to chat with them there. And now, back to our episode. Last year, I met up with Jagex CEO John Bellamy at Gamescom. It was a brief chat where we discussed the firm's plans to radically transform its monetization strategy. It was all about trying to win back fans to the original RuneScape, a plan that Bellamy admitted would probably lead to a drop in revenue. Since then, the company has not only implemented those changes, but they've also announced plans to take RuneScape spin-off Dragon Isles to console and aggressively looking to expand into new territories. They've also rebranded themselves slightly as Jagex, the

RuneScape company, just so it's 100% clear what they're all about going forward. They even sold off one non-RuneScape game, Scum, alongside its developer Gamepires to fellow UK studio Splash Damage. So, lots to catch up on. And as Jagex is very close to our offices here at The Game Business, I popped over to their studio to chat more with Bellamy about what's going on. And here is that conversation. Jon.
Yes.
Hello, sir.
Welcome back to The Game Business Show.
Thanks for having me.
Our most popular guest, according to according to the metrics.
start like that.
[laughter]
What do I say to this? Like, great. I'm really happy to hear it. Generally, I think a lot of RuneScape players saw that one.
I don't know if I've ever I don't think I even told you at the time. I once applied for a job We're in We're in your offices in Cambridge.
Yeah.
Um I actually applied for a job at RuneScape when I was at university.
job was it?
It was Oh, it was one of the I don't know if you you still do them. You had a It was a community role.
Yeah.
Where where you had to like answer the phones to I I I guess it's a
Answering the phones. A support role.
A support role, basically. Um we're stuck. I don't know how How do I level up this whatever.
Yeah.
And um I didn't get it. So, um

I I feel like I should say sorry, but that's so far detached from where we are. If you'd like to do it now, the door's wide open.
Yeah. Um
Um
Well, last time we caught up, you were changing The big thing we were talking about was how you were changing the monetization
Yeah.
of RuneScape. The idea was to win back the fans, even if that came at the expense of revenue.
Yeah.
So, my question now is you were experimenting 12 months ago, but we're almost 12 months on from that interview. Have you won back players, and has it impacted revenue?
It has impacted revenue, not positively, but exactly as we thought that it would. So, RuneScape revenue down is down quite a large chunk. The membership has now stabilized
Okay.
for the first time in about 4 years. And I think part of the thinking about this I said this on a video to the community at the time. Part of the thinking about this decision, the reason why I took it, the reason why we got the backing above me is because I don't think there was a legitimate way to reset the standards for the game that would allow us to revert to growth to like even have a shot at coming back to growth. I felt like that was the hygiene hit that we needed to take. And it was

painful and it has been painful exactly as we thought it would be. We do make less money now on RuneScape because of it even with membership prices slightly higher than they were this time last year. That's the reality. I think setting the table for being able to grow is not the same as expecting growth to be to to come as a result of setting the table. You need to put something on the table to bring people in.
Right. Okay.
And so we've set the table. We've done the job. We've taken the pain. We've spent the last year not just removing that monetization layer but like overhauling so much of the clunkiness and the pain within the game. The guy who runs our our RuneScape studio now has been here for I think 13 years. He's been a RuneScape player for 20. Like he knows this far better than even I do. Um and so the person like calling the shots on how to bring this thing back to life was a player in its golden age. And so I can think of nobody better to do it. So he's done a great job not least with removing the monetization stuff. Um but also just getting the game into a healthy position. So less daily, less FOMO, less of the rubbish. It's now in a really healthy spot. And so I've been

told very clearly I'm not to give anything away on this podcast but I think on October the 3rd um at RuneFest we'll be announcing our equivalent of putting a feast on the table
Okay.
to really actively win people back. And that'll be happening much sooner than I think many people expect.
Is this part of the integrity roadmap that you were you laid out?
So that was the laying of the table.
The integrity roadmap was all about cleaning up the mess and making sure that we were ready to say now is the time to come back to our game and here's a great reason to do it. That moment's about to come.
Right. Okay.
Yeah.
I'm interested how the conversation was with sort of your your your investors, your backers when you said right we're going to you know potentially lose some money or maybe lose money but see a reduction in revenue and and and that kind of stuff. Was everyone just immediately on board? How was that?
It was a long conversation. It was a conversation I think that started practically before I'd even joined. Okay. And so it was a Look, I think if we really want to swing for the fences, this is what it would look like. And the team above me all wanted to swing for

the fences and accepted that this was going to be short to medium-term pain. Um and they all agreed that we don't expect to see a turnaround happen inside of 12 months. This is a longer-term thing, but we're taking this investment and this risk because you can't continue to do exactly what we're currently doing and expect different behavior. And so we would rather own a slightly smaller thing that is growing and healthy than a larger thing that has been on a 5-year decline. And so they have their own calculus that I'm sure helps them say yes to that. But at least for us, that just felt like the right thing to do.
As a success of Old School RuneScape, is that would you have been able to do this if you didn't have that in the background?
Oh, I mean, who knows? Who know Would I even be here? Would Would it look like this? Would you and I be having this chat? Yeah. I've no idea. There's so much like butterfly effect stuff that happens in there. Let me put it this way. If the RuneScape studio was a standalone studio and it wasn't part of the RuneScape franchise, it wasn't part of Jagex, would this have still been the right move? I believe so.

Would it have been under this structure and this setup? Maybe not. I still would do what we did.
I missed your anniversary event, which you had quite a year. I've just I heard you had like an almost on the busiest June on record as well. Was it State of Play?
Yeah.
Some of Game Fest, Nintendo I just madness.
Yeah.
But I read an article and they mentioned the RS25 strategy. What's Tell me Tell me that that is.
Um the RS25 strategy is we've been around for 25 years.
Yeah.
We have a strategy this year and we make RuneScape.
[laughter]
That's kind of what it is. I think it's slightly more than that. If I If I give you the sort of more level-headed answer, there's a bunch of firsts that are happening. So, RS25 is all about three things. It's about turning around RuneScape and getting it into a stable state so it's not on a decline and that's our smaller product, but it deserves a great life ahead of it. Give it that shot. We've just talked about it. Um for Old School RuneScape, I think we broke just about every record we've ever had across every major metric in the last 12 months multiple times.

It's on an unbelievable kind of heater. Um we've been really happy with how that game's performed. It was about taking Old School from a scrappy but very successful studio to making a ton of investments or committing to a ton of investments. And I think we said publicly, correct me if I'm wrong, we're putting about 200 million pounds into um invested into our games um starting in its 25th anniversary for the next couple of years. And that's like a profound level of investment that will set Old School set it up to turn into a sort of stalwart product rather than a scrappy underdog. And then the third major element of RuneScape 25, at least from a game's perspective, was launching Dragon Wars into FCL. So, full content launch. That's happening in September. And with that moment comes a bunch of firsts. With that comes our first time in China, our first time in Japan, our first time in Korea, our first time translated into those languages, our first time on console, all three platforms. Um all coming at the same time on that launch day. It will be the third stable mate of

a growing franchise. RS25 was really about doubling down on the RuneScape franchise. Anything that isn't that is now gone. Anything that is that is front and center and those are the three big big drives.
I was going to talk about all these things. It's good that you you sort of set
Well, I teed you up.
No, perfect. And you only started like just over a year ago. This is this is a bit crazy. Let's talk about the fact that you are about RuneScape cuz you obviously have you have Scum with Gamepires and which you owned a really hardcore online survival game. We talked about this last time. I thought it was really cool game. And you sold it. Is there is there no room for anything outside of RuneScape? This is fully the vision for the future.
I mean, the answer is always never say never, but at least in I have no intention of going beyond RuneScape with this business. At least while I'm here. So much so that we changed the name of the company to Jagex, the RuneScape company. That is what I want us to be. And it is what we are now legitimately. Our team size is less because we have fewer studios and fewer products that aren't RuneScape, but focus is through the roof. And I think it's really liberating to be able to do one thing better than anybody else in the world, and that is

what we should be doing. No regrets.
Let's talk about Dragon Wilds. How what have you learned from the launch of Dragon Wilds?
Don't underestimate this IP. 100% do not count RuneScape out by any means. I think we've seen so much growth across Old School and so much strength in RuneScape, the game. There's a lot of people that I think don't quite realize how successful it's been in the last few years. And I think even for us, there is this little voice at the or there was this little voice at the back of the head which which was sometimes asked as a question our way, which is when do you go beyond RuneScape? And there's a whole bunch of assumptions underneath that question that that I actually really don't like. Dragon Wilds, I think, was a a wonderful validation that those questions don't need to be asked. Actually, this is one of the most loved and biggest IPs on Earth. It's one of the biggest and most established games IPs of all time. I heard a stat the other day, if we were a country, we'd be the fourth largest in the world, which is pretty insane. Dragon Wilds was an example of what what bringing this IP and translating it in a really effective

way to a new platform and a new sort of genre can achieve. I think we thought that game was going to sell about 200,000 units in early access. We're about 1.3 million now. Since the beginning of this month, we've sold about another 100,000 units. When we go to full content launch, it will be a meaningful number beyond that because of all the new platforms. So, it is don't count RuneScape out, but also you can absolutely bank on our transferability to other places and other platforms. I think that's unlocked something we didn't fully internalize, but maybe hoped for about a year ago. And now there's no avoiding the fact that this thing has legs.
To tell us part of this, you're talking about taking it to um um RuneScape to other places, you've done this APAC deal, right? So, you're bringing RuneScape to Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia. Um how are you performing in those markets currently?
On Dragon Wild specifically?
just RuneScape. How is that as a
RuneScape's had zero presence in those countries for the last 25 years.
And aren't you like the second biggest MMO in the
Thanks for pointing it out. Yeah.

We without those markets.
Imagine if we cracked those other ones, would it still be that sentence?
Yeah.
That's a fair question. Yeah, we have absolutely no presence. And part of that is because of what we make. We make these kind of Monty Python style humor, slightly self-deprecating, one guy one day a guy 15 years ago said we're not doing horses, and since then we've never made a horse in RuneScape despite it being a medieval point-and-click game. That kind of
[laughter]
Blackadder, Rowan Atkinson, very British style of humor resonates in a few places. It resonates really well in Finland. It resonates really well in Japan, as we've recently learned. It resonates very well in the Netherlands and in the US. It's been very Western world-centric. That hasn't always resonated culturally in other nations, or at least that's what we just assumed.
Mhm.
And then you release a product in China for the first time a week ago, and we've seen I think 41% of day one sales of Dragon Wilds on the day that we released were sold in China. Since then it's been more than 20%. And so, there's enough there, and with our fantastic partners helping to make that happen in Agora, there's enough there for us to say, "Look, maybe our long-held suspicions

about cultural fit aren't as true as we thought they were."
I think in the age of digital where everyone can sort of, you know, even even we know how big K-pop has become in this in this country, like the fact that we can access this stuff now, people are interested in those in those new worlds. We've seen Chinese content do very well in the West lately, and I think it's potentially true in in in reverse.
I think you're on a good point there. I think one of the downsides, and there's lots of upsides, but one of the downsides of being a 25-year-old business is nearly everything you could do has previously been considered at least once. And somebody somewhere will have come to a conclusion that we tried it or we sniffed it and it didn't work. Therefore, it doesn't work. And in 25 years, you go from Tamagotchi to iPhone, I don't know whatever one we're now, 28 plus max duplex. And and the whole world has changed in that gap. And so a lot of what we'd assumed doesn't work actually does or can. And so we're retesting a lot of the stuff we'd just written off years ago and finding a lot more green shoots than I think we expected.
I see Dragon Ball Z launching in

September.
Yeah.
It's a good month, isn't it?
[clears throat] [laughter]
Ah, yes. I mean, there is a queue.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The good news is it's a small industry and you know, rising tides and all boats and all that good stuff. That's the right answer. For us, we have a really unique advantage though. About 75% of all the people who've bought Dragon Ball Z today are RuneScape players past or present. So they know us, they're part of our world, they're part of our platform. We're really lucky that is an advantage we have. We haven't got close to tapping out the 300 million person audience that that is. And so yes, it's congested. And yes, we'll have to fight for our place. But the game deserves to stand on its own. It is genuinely very good. And secondarily, we have this unique advantage of all of these 300 million RuneScape players that that we can really sort of lean in on. And that helps to de-risk a bit. But you'd be foolish to say that it isn't harder today than it was 6 months ago.
Yeah, well. As you say, it's not all about launch either.
No.
Jagex had a big presence during Summer Game Fest for this thing. Is the US an opportunity? Or are you already pretty

much tapped out?
So it depends on what the question means. So about 60% of our players today across all of our RuneScape products are in the US. So we're very US-centric. We perform very well there. We always have.
Yeah, well, yeah.
Do we serve the US audience as well as perhaps we could? That's a different [clears throat] question. So for the first time again in 25 years, we just went to the US and held a live event. We did Deadman All-Stars, 4,000 people, fully sold out theater in Chicago. It was incredible. One of the best weekends of my life, and I'm sure that's true for others in the team as well. Um signed many, many things from hats to capes to pictures of feet to a human baby um during that event, not even a joke. I'll show you that picture afterwards.
Okay.
In any case, we came to the US for the first time, and I think that was a bit of a lightbulb moment for us in that we just haven't been as close to the US players as we'd have liked. They've come to us for years in the form of RuneFest and fan events and whatever else, but we're just not as close to those players as I would like us to be. Now, what you do with that information is up to anybody's guess at the moment, but it's a recognition.

I had the World of Warcraft team on earlier [clears throat] this year.
Oh, yeah.
And it was a good chat, actually. They also did very well for different reasons, actually. They've got a similar issue with it. It's an old game, right? It's been going on a long, long time. They're unlike They've got like multiple different versions of their classic game. And um what I found doing that video is their big challenge is got loads of different voices. Got people that They were there in the beginning. They want certain things. People in the middle. People with different, you know, they're trying to work out how to serve all of those demanding fan bases.
Mhm.
Comparatively, it's quite a simple approach you've got. You've got old school. You've got RuneScape, and then you've got these sort of spin-offs, I guess, maybe I'll call them that. Is that enough? Are you able Is that you being able to tweak those dials to make sure you're satisfying all those different queries? So, do you have that problem?
I don't know if it's a problem, honestly.
Mhm. It's a good problem, I guess.
But I don't know if it's a bad thing. I think if it was only the players that we had 20 years ago, I'd be concerned. If it was only the players from the last year, um I'd be concerned. I'm actually really glad we have a mix. I think it gives us

strength and stability. It gives us momentum. It also gives us great um freshness. And I think for a 25-year-old game like RuneScape, particularly in its old-school form, which is our biggest biggest product, for it to have gone through the surge that it has over the last year and be so zeitgeisty over that year, I think it's needed some of those new players and when you look at the numbers now, I think it's about half of the active members for Old School RuneScape have joined Old School as their first RuneScape game. They've chosen to play the 2007 version of a classic game as their first RuneScape experience and before that game they'd obviously never played RuneScape before. I think most people assume that this is something for the old-timers who've always been here. It's not true. It's not true. It stands alone as a game and performs on its own weight despite having the retro moniker.
Why?
The easy answer is it's great.
Yeah, okay.
The honest answer is I think it's a little bit like some of the more the metal bands from the late 90s. Bear with me. Like there was a time where they were the coolest bands in the world

and people unironically wore Metallica and Iron Maiden and Five Finger Death Punch shirts everywhere because they were just the coolest bands in the world. They still are extraordinarily cool. They had a bit of a dip in salience and the audience for Metallica and Iron Maiden kind of aged up with the band for a long period of time.
Yeah.
And then you start to see the Kylie Jenners of the world kind of wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts 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 reality.
Yeah, man.
But there is a bit of a resurgence and I think we have that same sort of feeling a bit with Old School.
I was at Download Festival two weekends ago.
How was it?
And it wasn't quite Metallica and Iron Maiden and Guns N' Roses were there.
Yeah.
Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. Which is my which is my era.
Yeah.
And there was a lot of young people there and I thought you weren't around. You weren't there.
You've not earned [laughter] this. Yeah.
Again, I think that's what we were talking about. Digital has made it even more accessible for people to cross borders and see

Chinese content and Korean content and totally see that. But I also think it's the same with generations. I didn't listen to the Beatles growing up. I did eventually have to discover them because it wasn't they weren't CDs you bought in the shop. They weren't the new thing. Whereas now a digital, it's very easy to go back, go, you know, you can go wherever.
Totally. That Meteora album has never left for me. And I think I think the point is that like great creations and great creative IP, they just transcend time genuinely, and I mean that honestly. I know at least for me, I'm sort of stuck in my ways, so I still listen to new metal from early 2000s. I'm a Breaking Benjamin sort of Diary of Jane guy. And that fits the Runescape group very, very well indeed. And I think the fact that we've captured, I think with our game, a portion of time that even those who weren't there in their sort of formative teenage years, still sort of long for. There's a collective nostalgia for the the simpler days before all the madness of social media and stuff. And even that I think has breached into the younger generations who weren't even alive for it, or necessarily mature for it. I think we offer a bit of that.
Yeah. And to change the subject, we

could talk about new metal.
We should. I read a quote from your SVP of product.
Oh, yeah, James.
And he said, "Jagex is leading from the heart again." And I I really like this. Um, something I've said before because I'm often asked when I do a lot on data, I'm often asked, you know, how do you use it? And I said, "Data should be used to back up your decisions. Yeah. It shouldn't be used to make your decisions." And I believe I've often I think it's true of any industry really, but it's definitely true of an artistic industry. You know what the right choice is. You you live you know your team, you know what they're good at, you know what they're not good at, you know what they could be good at. You know your product, you know your fans. And so therefore you go, "I think this is the right way." And the truth is you that is probably the right way. Then you look at the data, is it, you know, am I way off or, you know, but then you can use it to back up your decisions, make your case to the board or whatever it is you need to do. I really like that. I think leading from the your gut. And I don't mean that to sound like a very corporate answer to give to an investor or to a a business leader, but I think that's actually the

the way to go. It's not really a question, but I just really like that that that perspective.
He's absolutely right. So couldn't have put it better myself. Doesn't feel safe. I think it feels safe to have numbers making the decisions for you. I think as soon as you get lost in that, you're not really making decisions anyway. You're just letting consequences roll out of data points, which is unfortunate. I think for us, leading with heart is is the only thing that we can really do well. I think we're never going to out-data the big guns. We're never going to out-resource the big guns, even though we're putting our money where our mouth is as best we can and more than ever before. Actually, people who've grown up playing this game and have played it for 20 years and have been working here for 10 years doing the thing that they feel is right is nearly always the right thing to do. And the great news is we've got checks and balances in the way that we release updates to Old School anyway. We've got the polling system. Nothing goes into the game without a 70% supermajority of votes in game. And so we have safeguards already there. But the great news is the players who play our game and the people who make our games are nearly always the same people. So it's not that hard to get a read on what we should do. Don't always get it right. We nearly always

make some kind of mistake when we do something, but directionally it's normally from the heart, not from the head. And that's that's the price you pay.
I heard this story years ago about Fable. They were trying to put a list of the moves or the spells they were going to put in the game. And one of the spells was a character would disappear, appear behind another character, and then break their neck. And then there was another spell which turned them into a chicken. Anyone that's played Fable for 5 minutes knows exactly which one of those spells is a Fable spell.
I'm still mad about the dog, by the way.
So what we did would be the DLC. But I was pleased to find out that the instinct of that studio was to go with a chicken. And we I think that's a great example of it cuz I'm pretty sure if you tend to the Witcher community or another RPG, actually would be the other option. And the data wouldn't necessarily tell you that if you're looking at a broader industry data, but you know your your game anyway. I just I I'm saying the same thing.
Always go with the chicken. So slight slight aside, very slight tangent, and then we'll go back on script, I promise.
Go off script. It's a podcast.
So about a year ago on the RuneScape subreddit, so not Old

School, but RuneScape, we did a bunch of graphical work. The early game looks beautiful. Looks way better than ever before. That's not something we do because of the data, it's something we did because it felt right.
Yeah.
Doesn't necessarily move the needle, but it's better. Um when we did that, um there was a fence in a part of our game that impaled the edge of a barrel. And so, it was just a clipping of two assets. No big issue. One guy went out of his way to make it his life's journey to sort of get this graphical interference issue fixed. Made a post every day on Reddit saying day 112 of waiting for this barrel to be fixed. And so, I sat with the with one of the guys, one of the lead designers on RuneScape in this office. And I said, "Look, I've seen this Reddit post for the last 129 days. Are we going to do something?" And then literally, 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 a day 400 of waiting for this stupid barrel thing to be over. Made the barrel bigger. Now it

is out of the fence where the whole where the fence was leaking water forevermore. I think that playfulness is really who we are at our best. And if you lose it, you lose the chicken.
It feels very British, that.
Yeah.
Like you There's someone who's flagged the bug, and our response is to troll it, right? It's the It's the lean into what makes fun of it in a gentle way.
Totally.
In a very, as you say, sort of Monty Python style.
Yeah.
You don't want to lose that.
It's the magic of it. It makes this place turn over. It makes players happy. It's It's who we are at our best.
Personally. How important is all about console then? You're coming to console. Exciting.
It is.
All three.
It is.
We saw some of it out there. Um how important is the console to your vision for where things are heading?
It's important. Um our future doesn't depend on it. No. It's another validation point. It's a It's a testing what we've always assumed to be not right for us. And like I said before, the last 25 years, somebody somewhere looked at console, said it wasn't going to be possible for one of our core games. Probably not even worth it if the upside isn't that much. Let's not bother. And that has just hung around in

the walls of the place being sort of checked every few years. This is our first legitimate, we're actually going to do this thing moment. 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 always we've never been and therefore it will be hard to get off the ground. We've done some of the numbers on this. We think there's about 6 million of our historical players on each of the two main platforms, i.e. Xbox and PlayStation, and then about twice that on Switch.
That are already on the console. And 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 just there. Let's bring a game to them that they're going to recognize and love the IP of." I think what it does for us is it validates collectively for everybody in this building and beyond that the horizons we thought were there aren't the horizons. They're just a a new place for us to play. And actually the true edge of the horizon is much further away. And that does a lot, I think, internally for the way that we think about ourselves and the company and the game and our players. Um and I think it

helps to healthily unlock perceptions of ambition.
Twice that on Switch. What is it What is it Is it just
It's just a lot of players on Switch. Honestly is the answer. There's no secret math as far as I can tell.
Um or maybe I thought maybe there's a a vibe to RuneScape that naturally, you know,
I think there's something in that.
Yeah.
I've got no numbers to say it, but you're probably right.
Yeah.
We'll see what the numbers look like after we actually see players
data. All these price rises on consoles though, does it does it give you a bit of a pause?
It does a bit.
Um
I mean, it's a control the controllables thing, isn't it?
Yeah.
So, you know, we could absolutely lament that it's happening and, you know, I 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, we're no longer selling physical discs."
Mhm.
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 as well. Very best interpretation of giving them what they want and carry on one foot after another.

The rest of it that is outside of our control isn't really worth worrying too much about. It's probably over simplistic, but it's it's honest.
Your game's particularly resource intensive. Is it do you think
No. Relatively sheltered from it.
You could run old school on a potato. Absolutely. It's brilliant. It's one of the best things about it. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can buy a super cheap to run it. The consoles are the consoles, aren't they?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's not the console problem.
That's it.
I think it's been remarkable. You've come in and you've you've you you suggested some of these changes were happening before you stepped through the door, but it's it's been quite uh this journey already and and you've still got to see the results for it. This is a very general question. If you listen to podcasts, which I know you do, you might I ask this a lot.
I do.
What is the five-year vision? What was your dream for RuneScape?
The dream is that we're not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world, we're the number one.
Oh wow.
There's a big old gap between us and number one, but if we get it right, we know we can make headway. We know we can do great things. It's lofty and it's ambitious, but if you're going to set lofty and

ambitious goals, why not swing for the top? So that that's that's the number one goal. I think slightly more pragmatically in terms of what that looks like day-to-day, I would love in five years time to have at least three very large, growing RuneScape games for a combined multi-million person audience that feels happier with where the games are today than they do right now. We'll have done our job well.
Guess with all the live service there's a lot of conversation around how hard that is with people's time and
Mhm.
that that limit really how many that you might be able to do and cuz I guess there's a chance that these games might compete with each other, right?
A bit. A bit, but I don't worry too much if the strawberry ice cream ice cream competes with the chocolate. We just want to sell ice cream. And that I think is a good thing. And actually we can get more cross-pollination between our games, I'll be grateful for it. I think it's no bad thing. I can tell you right now I think the average session length in Old School RuneScape per day is just under 5 hours. These are people who on average are 32 years old. They have jobs and lives and families and kids and all that good stuff.
Wow. You're lucky if I get 5 hours a

week.
Well, this is it. Ask me what I'm doing behind the scenes while I'm doing the job is I'm logged into Old School. Right now I'm fishing.
Oh.
And not literally right now, but shortly I will be. Um, and that I think is true for many people. There's a There's millions of Deloitte consultants out there somewhere that have got Excel open on one screen and Old School on the other. And I think you design for that reality and that's what we do.
Picture that scene in Avengers when someone's playing So, you know the scene in Avengers someone's playing Galaga and you want that to be Old School, I guess, isn't it?
Phoebe Bridgers recently released a unbelievable new song and I got a an unsuspecting email a few weeks ago saying, "Can we use Old School footage in the music video?" And so I said, "That sounds great." Um, not knowing what's going to come of it. Anyway, saw the music video go live and now it's like a real cross-cultural moment where in the middle of this like super poppy very sort of, um, zeitgeisty music video, there's a guy in a gas station playing Old School RuneScape in the background and it so well encapsulates what Old School is for so many people.
Oh, wow.
It really hit home for me in that moment. Like, this is so much bigger than our office and our team. It's It's

actually kind of a cultural thing that exists in the background of people's lives for years on end. It's kind of like a family pet.
John, I'm Jagex is the local studio to me. So, I've always been a big fan. I'm excited that it's doing you're going on this journey.
That's it. I'm glad we finally got you here.
Yeah, well, I I've been here before, but a long time ago. Yeah, yeah. I think you'd launched a publishing You personally you weren't here, but the publishing division was being launched. Which I don't think's here anymore.
Correct.
So, um, it was a It was that long ago, but yeah, it's nice to be back and
We'll get back to you about the job application, as well.
John, thank you.
Cheers, Chris.
Thank you to John there for joining us. That's it for today's episode of the Game Business Show. We will, of course, be back with more news, more interviews, more insight, and more analysis in the days and weeks to come. As always, if you want to make sure you don't miss an episode, just go to the gamebusiness.com, stick in your email for free, and you'll get an alert every time we put out an episode. There is a paid subscriber option as well, if you'd like to receive our weekly micro podcast on a Monday. But, that's it for me today. Until next

time, thank you for tuning in.