Everything Jagex touches turns to shit. They are not good at creating. At best they are a steward for already created IP and the community provides that taste that makes it good.
Jagex blunders hard and gets very lucky each time. The entire Oldschool RuneScape idea came from a private server whose owner was sued out of existance by Jagex, only for the community to revolt, and when official servers launched, they only survived because Jagex upper management forgot about their existance until the community did enough marketing for it.
Blizzard didn't forget about it though, they just ignored it until it became too big to ignore with Elysium, and then took it seriously and launched a great version of vanilla WoW with Classic.
They very famously did not ignore it, with the whole "you think you want that but you don't", the shutdown of Nostalrius and so on. People were going to jail for WoW private servers before 2010
yes, I meant ignoring the customer base that wanted it, but actively denying them is probably a better term. pserver shutdowns always will happen regardless if they're visible. I used to do a lot with them when I was young
Maybe Jagex from ~15 years ago, but today they are hitting out of the park with OSRS updates. You can't tell me with a serious face that Varlamore or Sailing are bad or were not created by Jagex, sure they had to pass in the polls but only a few things have failed that.
Their new game, Dragonwilds, has been very successful. Jagex leadership today is not the same as Jagex leadership 10 years ago.
If anything, they're one of the first companies proving that getting away from gatcha/pay-to-win/pay-for-aesthetic/seasonal mechanics can be a good business decision in 2026, where there are many, many gamers who care about earned power (and earned aesthetic) and no longer want to be on a seasonal loot/rating treadmill.
For me, that's personal and I'm happy about it. I've played MMORPGs my whole life, really the only genre I'm interested in. Everquest, EQ2, GW, WoW (and many xpacs), OSRS, etc. Other than OSRS more recently, I've felt left behind for many, many years now. I want to play games where the journey is the point, and where earning what you have is fundamental.
WoW Forever, which in terms of player numbers is looking to be Blizzard's most successful move in over a decade, is coming largely due to the trail blazed by OSRS and the Jagex team.
Personally, I find Lord of the Rings online to be killer if you want the journey...
I've been playing for ~20 years and still haven't hit max level (currently, I have a 138 out of 160 as my highest). Still have about half the map left to explore too - its HUGE and still gets regular updates. Freeps vs Creeps is a neat take on PVP if thats your thing too
No, todays Jagex is just as oblivious and short-sighted as ever. They don't only make OSRS. It took Jagex over a decade to remove Treasure hunter (microtransaction gambling) from the game despite its addition (and continued operation at the obvious requirement of whatever of several, 7-ish? PE firms owned the studio). It was added for the obvious goal of increasing revenue on top of subscription cost, but grew into a game feature that overcame traditional levelling and moneymaking in exchange for real world payments. There was a period of about 5 years where the meta for training any skill was to kill engdame bosses and then gamble with the gold you made, using the xp rewarded from treasure hunter to level up. It was simply a more efficient use of time to train any of the 26 skills by not training any of the skills and instead gambling. It was so bad that they added an option for this interface to gamble multiple times upon a single user input and automatically redeem the rewards.
OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.
Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.
That was a year+ ago, which notably is when they decided to clean the game up. I don't see the point of using the past as an example when they very explicitly (like it was the very first set of criticisms aired in their keynote yesterday) are trying to move away from that.
What you're describing at the end is an attempt for a company to diversify and cutting their losses early to stem bleeding from projects which wouldn't have met the expected ROI. Gaming is a difficult industry and the majority of games do not get big. It's not surprising that the majority of their efforts to branch out failed.
None of your criticisms of the main game apply during the past year of updates. That + their attempt to create "sanitized" servers this year looks like another attempt to diversify - away from the microtransaction-based revenue source into a stable subscription source, assuming they get the playercounts.
It's insulting because RS/RS3 was designed from the perspective that everything leads to everything else. Prior to the sixth age, and I'm not calling that a mistake, and especially MTX, skills had a certain curve and quest lines made sense
What the MTX team apparently did is pocket all of it while not using the money to improve the game
Whether or not they're doing a good job now, their behavior across many years was/is despicable
The Jagex of today is worse. For every good update there is a landslide of terrible balancing that erodes 100s of hours of progress. They have paved over so much of the game they cant really be called old school runescape.
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If anything, they're one of the first companies proving that getting away from gatcha/pay-to-win/pay-for-aesthetic/seasonal mechanics can be a good business decision in 2026, where there are many, many gamers who care about earned power (and earned aesthetic) and no longer want to be on a seasonal loot/rating treadmill.
For me, that's personal and I'm happy about it. I've played MMORPGs my whole life, really the only genre I'm interested in. Everquest, EQ2, GW, WoW (and many xpacs), OSRS, etc. Other than OSRS more recently, I've felt left behind for many, many years now. I want to play games where the journey is the point, and where earning what you have is fundamental.
WoW Forever, which in terms of player numbers is looking to be Blizzard's most successful move in over a decade, is coming largely due to the trail blazed by OSRS and the Jagex team.
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OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.
Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.
speff · · focus · HN ↗
What you're describing at the end is an attempt for a company to diversify and cutting their losses early to stem bleeding from projects which wouldn't have met the expected ROI. Gaming is a difficult industry and the majority of games do not get big. It's not surprising that the majority of their efforts to branch out failed.
None of your criticisms of the main game apply during the past year of updates. That + their attempt to create "sanitized" servers this year looks like another attempt to diversify - away from the microtransaction-based revenue source into a stable subscription source, assuming they get the playercounts.
alex1138 · · focus · HN ↗
What the MTX team apparently did is pocket all of it while not using the money to improve the game
Whether or not they're doing a good job now, their behavior across many years was/is despicable
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Fizz43 · · focus · HN ↗
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