For those of you who play Runescape I’m sure you know that it is an exciting and addicting game. For those of who don’t play, you can check it out at www.runescape.com or www.jagex.com.
The game Runescape has been running strong for about a decade with numerous improvements and upgrades. Upon the release of Runescape2, things began to appear as if they were headed down hill. The Gower Brothers (creators of Runescape) met with Berry Diller the CEO of IAC (interactive corp.) to see if they could work out a deal to buy Runescape. IAC owns Ticketmaster.com ask.com and envite among other companies all which started small and were eventually taken over.
A question arises though, why would the Gower Brothers want to sell Runescape? Is there something on the horizon that they can see or predict. Runescape alone makes $50 million dollars US in Annual revenue. Things have been going good so far, as well as striking a multi-million dollar deal with Pay Free advertising company, but maybe the problem isn’t outside of the game…
After the release of Runescape2, an exponential increase in Scammers, Hackers and Macros appeared, and new macros haven’t stopped increasing in number. These problems have lessened numbers of actual player joining, the tally currently stands at 5 million active players, 55% of which reside in the united states and over a million of who actually pay $5 a month for an increased membership.
Runescape may continue to function fine, but will anyone still play it? Runescape is highly criticized by the public for it’s apparent “horrible” graphics however it is the most advanced java game in the world and does not need any high end plug-in’s or graphics cards to play. No matter what road Runescape takes, it seems it has reached it’s peak and is now descending.
There may however be hope. The Gower Brothers could just want out of the successful company and want to do something else with their millions. The last option available in my opinion is for Jagex as a whole to go public. That alone would be hectic and chaotic for the independently own company. Legal issues would be brought up and then Jagex would have to listen to share holders and would be in complete power of their game.
Jagex would not be the first company to do this. Google was once independently owned before it became public and did extremely well. Google however, has recently become a buyer with the purchase of Youtube™. Could Runescape follow in Google’s footsteps and make it big? Or is Runescape just in for some very, very tough times.
