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.
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.
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.
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
Fizz43 · · focus · HN ↗
drpotato · · focus · HN ↗
shit_game · · focus · HN ↗
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.
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