Cambridge-base games company Jagex has announced that its popular MMO RuneScape has hit an all-time high for paid memberships and monthly active users.
The firm claims that monthly active users, in fact, doubled during 2018, with the company seeing "big gains" in Q4.
That's likely thanks in part to Old School Runescape launching on mobile devices. That release, plus the tests for Android and iOS versions of regular RuneScape, has resulted in over one million subscribers. Furthermore, five million people have installed Old School RuneScape on mobile.
In addition, the firm has reiterated the $1bn revenue-to-date figure for RuneScape - though, in fact, that figure was $1.064bn as of June 2018 when the company revealed its new Partners label.
This comes as the game turns 18 years old.
“2018 was a fantastic year for our RuneScape games, which have truly come of age," Jagex boss - and PC Pulse member - Phil Mansell said.
"The franchise has been growing consistently for five years, and we’ve seen a surge of further community growth with the move to mobile. Old School RuneScape’s successful mobile launch was made possible by our incredible team who’ve been able to make this classic gameplay smoothly in a mobile form-factor, and which allows players to enjoy the convenience of completely interoperable PC to mobile cross-play. This achievement showcases our living games philosophy; bringing deeply engaging community experiences to players wherever they are.
“We find that the more we listen to, engage with, and empower the community the more it fosters a true connection; with each other and with the games. The big increases we’re seeing in both membership and active users show that we’re not only able to bring new players into RuneScape but we’re able to offer the kind of rich, evergreen content that keeps them engaged for the long term.
“With this success, we’ve continued to increase investment levels to expand our games, as well as bringing in a slate of hugely talented people to join us in development, technology and publishing.”
In August of last year, Jagex announced it was going to be helping other developers publish their games with its Partners label. That's on top of other projects being developed at the company itself.
Jagex will be speaking at PC Connects London 2019 on January 21st and 22nd. You can buy cheaper PC Connects-specific tickets here, while tickers that grant access to that conference, as well as the larger Pocket Gamer, Connects and our younger sibling Blockchain Gamer Connects can be purchased here.
