Jagex introduced that its open world survival recreation RuneScape: Dragonwilds is now out there in early entry on Steam.
Jon Bellamy, who took over as CEO of Runescape writer Jagex on March 4, mentioned in an interview with GamesBeat that the sport is a giant wager on a brand new sort of gameplay for RuneScape followers.
The title is about on the forgotten continent of Ashenfall within the RuneScape universe that’s infested with dragons. Within the recreation, gamers collect, craft, and wield highly effective magic in a co-op survival journey powered by Unreal Engine 5.
Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Jagex is doing a deep dive at the moment and speaking concerning the new journey with followers. Solely by mastering survival and uncovering historic secrets and techniques are you able to hope to slay the Dragon Queen—alone or with allies.
It’s a giant wager for RuneScape, a web based recreation world which has generated $3 billion so far and has had 300 million registered customers over the many years. The sport nonetheless has 1.3 million lively subscribers, Bellamy mentioned. In December 2024, the 24-year-old recreation had the best membership ranges it ever had. Bellamy sees it as a recreation for making recollections and stirring nostalgia.
Right this moment the RuneScape massively multiplayer on-line role-playing recreation (MMORPG) franchise contains each RuneScape and Outdated College RuneScape, on PC and cellular, provide ever-evolving, extremely lively worlds and community-focused improvement.
The brand new RuneScape: Dragonwilds journey blends magic, excessive fantasy with mild RPG parts and iconic RuneScape lore. Gamers can do a solo journey or crew up with as much as three mates throughout Ashenfall, which has by no means been explored earlier than. Bellamy mentioned the corporate constructed the sport on group suggestions, with a number of closed alpha checks to evaluate fan response to the design.
Bellamy himself has performed greater than 100 hours of the sport, which has co-op modes and is replayable.
“It’s going to be very familiar to players,” Bellamy mentioned. “It’s a new take on something familiar.”
A longtime fan and a company merry-go-round
Paul and Andrew Gower started constructing in a kitchen in Nottinghamshire in 1998. They launched it in 2001 and it was successful. In 2013, Jagex launched Outdated College RuneScape to revert again to a 2007 model of the sport. It did so as a result of gamers signed a petition saying they needed the outdated recreation again.
Jagex bounced round a bit currently. In 2016 Jagex was bought by Hongtou, a Chinese language funding firm, which was subsequently acquired by Zhongji Holdings, which later modified its title to Fukong Interactive Leisure. Jagex was offered for $530 million to Macarthur Fortune Holding in April 2020.
Within the midst of the pandemic in 2021, the corporate was acquired by Carlyle in 2021. In 2022, Jagex expanded with the acquisition of Gamepires, which made SCUM, a multi-million promoting open-world survival title.
Then CVC Capital Companions and Haveli Investments acquired Jagex in February 2024. Again in March, Bellamy was appointed CEO of Jagex to succeed Phil Mansell, who served as CEO since 2017.
“This is the dream job for me,” Bellamy mentioned. “I’ve been playing RuneScape for 20 years. I worked briefly at Jagex for three or four years about a decade ago, and then was asked by CVC, (the current owners alongside Haveli), to help evaluate Jagex as a business.”
Bellamy has had loads of coaching as he has been a RuneScape participant for greater than twenty years. He served on Jagex’s board since 2024 and he held government roles at Jagex from 2015 to 2018. He was additionally an exec at social on line casino recreation firm Huuuge Video games from 2019 to 2023.
Mansell, who labored as CEO for eight of his 14 years at Jagex, will advise Bellamy for a time and mentioned in a press release that Bellamy cares concerning the firm’s video games and enterprise. Bellamy appears himself as a steward for the sport franchise which means a lot to hundreds of thousands.
Bellamy did so and CVC and Haveli acquired Jagex later. He served on the board and was faraway from that position when Mansell determined to step down. The homeowners did an analysis after which appointed Bellamy as CEO again in March. Operating the corporate isn’t almost the identical as being a fan or developer.
“I have to remind myself every day that I’m not a game designer,” Bellamy mentioned.
He’s comfortable to preside over the launch of RuneScape’s first recreation in additional than 10 years, and it has been within the works for greater than three years with a crew that has ranged from 30 to 50 folks.
Investing in RuneScape: Dragonwilds
The sport is probably Jagex’s greatest new product funding so far, but it’s a small a part of the five hundred employees, which is closely tasked with sustaining RuneScape and Outdated College RuneScape. When a recreation firm is profitable with titles like these ones, it’s not straightforward to launch a model new recreation.
“For many years, we’ve been experimenting as a company, even during the last time I worked here 10 years ago, with what a RuneScape game would look like as an isometric game played over the shoulder, with Unreal graphics — what would the world look like?”
Bellamy credited Jesse America, government producer, for taking a giant swing and arising with an method of contemporary graphics in a much-loved universe that has been positively acquired by followers to this point.
“They’ve basically been asking for a game like this for two decades now, and when we announced that Dragonwilds was now available to wish list just two weeks ago, people said it’s finally happening,” Bellamy mentioned.
Previously two weeks, RuneScape: Dragonwilds has been wishlisted greater than 350,000 occasions.
Requested why folks nonetheless play the sport, Bellamy mentioned, “I get asked this a lot. It’s truly unique. It’s not an MMORPG in the way that many others are. For example, a quest in RuneScape is radically different, to say, a quest in World of Warcraft, where you might be asked to go and fetch a certain number of resources and bring them back to a person.”
He added, “A quest in RuneScape can be many hours of high-fantasy storytelling with tongue in cheek British humor. And I think that creates an alchemy charm that doesn’t really exist in many other games. And that’s why I think it over indexes in the U.S. and in the U.K. so well. Ultimately, it’s the kind of place that doesn’t rely on expansion packs to remain evergreen. It’s the kind of universe where you can quite happily spend years on end, and most players do.”
In truth, the typical participant lifetime is now greater than 5 years, and you may spend a few years of escapist enjoyable within the universe with out counting on growth pack fashion releases, he mentioned.
Whereas Jagex bounced from proprietor to proprietor, Bellamy mentioned the employees has been steady and has been for quite a lot of years. Many of the crew is recreation builders, and plenty of of them have 1000’s of hours of play expertise in RuneScape.
“We see a lot of people who’ve grown up playing the game and they recognize just how magical it is,” he mentioned. “They dreamed of working on RuneScape as maybe a child or as a teenager growing up. Maybe they went and spent a few years at Deloitte or something to be an adult, and then realize, actually they still just want to come and work on RuneScape.”
Previously, the technique was to broaden the corporate past its RuneScape roots. However Bellamy’s purpose is to obsess over the core recreation and enhance the participant expertise. He pays consideration to lively gamers in addition to those that observe from the sidelines however nonetheless take into account themselves a part of the group.
The trade’s woes
As for the trade’s layoffs, he mentioned, “It’s been an incredibly tough couple of years for the industry. There’s still a very large number of professionals who are out of work or looking for roles. And every time I open LinkedIn, I can see that firsthand. It’s not lost on me. The sustainability of the industry in the long term required some of that shake up.”
He added, “I think we did collectively over-hire with irresponsible practices during the COVID years in particular, and so we saw a reaction to that. All of that is shaking out of the system as we came back to normality. I think that’s a real shame that it happened in the way that it did, and that it coincided with some of the more structural changes, particularly within mobile gaming, with the introduction of ATT (Apple’s push for privacy over targeted ads). It feels like we’re at a confluence point now where the cost of development has never been higher.”
Add to that financial instability, and that makes it exhausting to put money into any new undertaking.
He mentioned, “It’s never been harder to build and release large scale, ambitious new games for those of us who are still trying to do it. We’re putting our best foot forward, but we also recognize that it’s much harder than it was a few years ago.”
And he mentioned, “So while it’s easy to understand what has happened and why it has happened, we can honestly say in good faith that we’re we’re doing our best to push the industry forward and make the games that we think the industry deserves and the players want.”
Wanting round the remainder of the sport trade, which is beset with layoffs and unsuccessful reside service video games, Bellamy thinks they’ve unsustainable practices, are unfinished, and have monetization fashions which are aggressive and don’t characterize honest worth anymore.
“I think the general gameplay experience for a live service game is worse than it was 10 years ago,” he mentioned. “I think RuneScape and Old School RuneScape are an oasis in the desert. You pay a subscription fee and get access to the whole game for as long as you want.”
“I’m sure you’re seeing who is happy and who isn’t happy in the games ecosystem with the latest delayed releases. From my perspective, it seems like people are broadly unhappy. So if we can initiate some of that change and carry the torch, that’s a legacy we’re leaving,” he mentioned.
Whereas some might view avid gamers at the moment as entitled, Bellamy doesn’t see it that approach. He simply attended RuneFest, which drew 1000’s of gamers to the U.Okay. It had a web promoter rating of 89%.
“We can’t just say gamers are too entitled. That’s a quarter of the planet,” he mentioned.
So he doesn’t need to develop past RuneScape.
“I don’t see it that way,” Bellamy mentioned. “I actually think that being the RuneScape company is the very best thing that we can be. I think for games like ours that have generated multiple billions of dollars of revenue from hundreds of millions of players, there’s no shame in being successful.”
