Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy has shared his lofty aspiration for RuneScape to be the biggest MMO in the world in the next five years. That, for those unaware, would mean toppling World of Warcraft from the top spot.
Speaking to Chris Dring at The Game Business, Bellamy presented his desire for the company, while offering a “pragmatic” approach about how Jagex could get there.
“The dream is we’re not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world, we’re the number one,” Bellamy said. “There’s a big ol’ gap between us and number one. But we know if we get it right, we can make headways. We know we can do great things.”
As for how these headways could pick up, Bellamy said that in five years time he wanted “at least three” very large growing RuneScape games “for a combined multi-million person audience.” Achieving that, Bellamy believes, would mean they’d have “done their job well.”
Those three games would be Old School RuneScape, RuneScape, and RuneScape: Dragonwilds, the latter being the most recent survival crafting addition to the companies’ repertoire, launching out of Early Access later this September.
But what about splitting your audience between these games? There is a possibility these three games could compete with each other.
This doesn’t seem to phase Bellamy. “I’m not worried if the strawberry ice-cream outsells the chocolate ice-cream,” he said. “We just want to sell ice-cream.”
He also highlighted that the average play session length per-day for Old School RuneScape was just under a meaty five hours, which for a playerbase aged 32, on average, isn’t too shabby at all.
“Ask me what I’m doing behind the scenes while I’m doing the job: I’m logged into Old School, right now I’m fishing. That’s true for many people. There are millions of Deloitte consultants out there somewhere who have Excel open on one screen and Old School open on another. I think you design for that reality and that’s what we do.”
RuneScape launched over 25 years ago, and is still going strong. With seemingly no end in sight for both of Jagex’s point-and-click MMOs and a new venture on the way later this year, who knows? Maybe we could see a future where RuneScape takes the crown.
