gaming’s biggest success stories, but unless you play it or know
someone who does, you’ve probably never heard of it. Launched in
2001 by Jagex Software, an
independent studio based in the UK, it’s a traditional fantasy
role-playing game that boasts six million active monthly players,
almost all of them in the English-speaking world — making
RuneScape more popular in the West than World of Warcraft. (Over half
of WoW’s 10 million players are based in Asia.) Do a Google trend comparison of RuneScape to World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, the latest MMORPG darling,
and you’ll see that the web traffic of Jagex’s indie title
outstrips both of them. Despite all this, it’s received
comparatively little coverage, even by the gaming press.
That may change soon, because this week Jagex will make its first
appearance at one of gaming’s biggest trade shows — the Electronic Entertainment Expo
in Los Angeles — where it will debut a graphically upgraded
version of the game called RuneScape High Detail. Ahead of the launch,
I sat down with the Jagex team last week to find out how, with so
little attention, the modest-looking RuneScape has attracted so many
players.
Originally created by Andrew Gower and his brother Paul while Andrew
was still an undergrad at Cambridge, RuneScape runs on Java, making it
accessible to anyone who can get on the web. It’s also free,
though 60 percent of the world’s content is restricted until you
upgrade to a $5 monthly subscription, which some one million RuneScape
players currently pay. And while even RuneScape High Detail
won’t win Jagex any graphics awards, the developers have
compensated by creating a game world with depth and variety of play.
“In terms of gameplay,” influential game developer Raph Koster notes, “RuneScape is a very worldy world, offering a diverse array of activities that frankly, resembles Ultima Online.”
(Koster was that classic game’s lead designer.) At the same time,
the Java code makes it easy to add new features and make quick fixes.
As Jagex CEO Geoff Iddison noted to me, “The beauty of Java is it’s platform independent.”
The result? Tremendous viral growth, especially from very young
gamers on a limited budget. Jagex won’t give out specific
numbers, but Iddison told me their greatest expense is payroll for 400
employees; he also said their profit margin is well over 50 percent.
More details on Jagex/RuneScape:
- New content (questions, items, etc.) added to RuneScape every two weeks
- 1.2 megabyte Java app
- Peak concurrency: 250,000
- Average player time: 12.5 hours/week
- RuneScape is a sharded MMORPG (i.e. copies of the world run on separate servers)
- 250 RuneScape shards for up to 2,000 players each. Unlike many MMORPGs, player characters are not bound to a single shard.
- 200 servers total
- Main player demographics: 60 percent are from the U.S., 25 percent
from the EU, smaller percentages from Australia/New Zealand and Canada.
Player age typically 8-20, approximately 80 percent between 10-16.
- RuneScape HD feeds graphic data to computers with 3D cards for
dynamic rendering. Displays at 15 frames per second on minimum spec
computers, but can optimize up to 50 FPS. Can display in full screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment