Jon Bellamy, the CEO of Jagex, speaks in an interview about the success of RuneScape and revealed a very exciting statistic.
The big challenge: Online games of all kinds, which want to offer a successful service for many years, eventually face the same challenge that becomes trickier to solve over time: More veterans leave the game than new players join. The community shrinks. Fewer players mean lower revenues. Smaller turnover leads to rarer updates. Even more players quit.
All games naturally want to bypass, reverse, or at least slow down this negative spiral. Most service games that have been successful for years manage at least the latter. However, few can sustainably reverse the trend. The older such a game gets, the more likely it is that new players will bounce off for one of two reasons:
- It feels technically outdated and gameplay-wise old-fashioned compared to new games
- The extensive content built up over the years is overwhelming
Many MMO developers try to address these two pain points with graphics updates and fresh starter experiences. However, it is difficult to fight against time itself. However, there is one online role-playing game that apparently has found the cheat code for this challenge.
Old School MMO finds the Holy Grail of sustainability
Which MMO ignores the negative trend? Old School RuneScape went live in 2013, is based on RuneScape from 2007, and has taken a different path than its predecessor. The community has always been involved in determining the direction of the Old School remake.
We already knew that this plan has been working wonderfully for developer Jagex for years. The MMORPG can repeatedly record new milestones for its active player numbers – most recently, in April 2026, an impressive 250,000 players were online on the servers at the same time.
New is a piece of information that Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy has now revealed in an interview with “The BeheCast” on YouTube. About 50 percent of the currently active community of Old School RuneScape apparently joined the RuneScape franchise in the last 5 years, according to Bellamy.
Half of the players Old School RuneScape currently has have never played RuneScape before 5 years ago. They started with Old School. I was blown away when I learned this. It’s so unintuitive. I thought it would mainly be people who have always been there.
Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy in an interview with “The BeheCast” on YouTube
In addition, there are supposed to be 100 to 200 million (!) players who played years ago, then left, and are now back. These returnees are said to make up the second largest group within the community of Old School RuneScape, according to Jon Bellamy. Only a minority of players have been there from the start and have never turned their back on Old School RuneScape.
What is the secret of success? Jon Bellamy also talks about this in the interview. In his view, one can only achieve such a positive trend after all these years if one has done so much right in the game that the community spreads its enthusiasm organically through word-of-mouth – which can then create a kind of hype over time that attracts many new players.
According to Bellamy, however, two other things are also important: The team at Jagex lives RuneScape with great passion and is at the same time small and agile enough to respond quickly to such a hype or other matters. There is no need to fight through several management levels and the jungle of bureaucracy to implement things.
Jagex not only wants to reverse the trend with Old School RuneScape, but also with the original RuneScape. The MMO is celebrating its 25th anniversary with the so-called “Road to Restoration”. This is a roadmap for updates designed to make the venerable MMORPG fit for the future and more attractive for new players. More about this can be found here: One of the most successful MMORPGs of all time is modernizing its look: “This is everything I ever wanted”
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