Can a 2001 MMO Dethrone WoW? — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:02] we're the number one. >> [music] Bellamy. And last March, he returned to Jagex as their new CEO, and since then,

[00:15] without even bothering to say the enemy's name, he has decided that RuneScape, of all games, is the one to dethrone World of Warcraft. A tall order. There's been a fair few WoW

[00:29] if you don't play RuneScape, you might think that this is some form of elaborate joke. It seems bizarre. How can something that looks like this compete with World of Warcraft? Surely not. They're entirely different games.

[00:43] One is an immersive, beloved MMORPG with decades of content, a thriving community, and is considered dangerously addictive. The other one is World of Warcraft. And we can all point at the graveyard of WoW killers that tried to

[00:56] come for the king and really have not tended to do that well. Almost every single one of them failed. WoW has been the number one MMO for over 20 years, [music] and that's a spot that they earned and fought damn hard to keep. So,

[01:10] for something else to dethrone it, never mind a point-and-click MMO from 2001, it's going to take something close to a miracle. Now, the guy in question, John Bellamy, has only been the CEO of Jagex for a year, and he comes from a history

[01:24] of private equity and venture capital. So, hey, clearly he's just talking the usual investor nonsense to make sure he keeps his job. Right? Well, that is what it looks like at first glance. But, after digging into

[01:40] it, it turns out there's more to this story. I genuinely think Blizzard may need to pay some serious attention to RuneScape. I said it would take a miracle to top WoW, and the thing is, miraculous is kind of the only way to

[01:55] describe the year that RuneScape [music] has been having. They've done some things that basically we never see game developers do. broke just about every record we've ever had across every major metric in the

[02:10] last 12 months multiple times. It's on an unbelievable kind of heater. >> That's kind of wild, right? Though, it is something that we can see. The meteoric rise of O S R S has been incredible to watch. Now, you might

[02:23] think it's a rejection of modern-day like say our own classic World of like say our own classic World of Warcraft, but it's a whole lot older. O S R S released in 2013 as a reaction to player dissatisfaction with where

[02:35] Runescape was heading and it settled in fairly nicely. And right from the very start they established what I call the first ingredient of their secret sauce and that is the democratic classic plus treatment. You see, [music] O S R S

[02:48] players get new features, new content, new regions, new skills, everything. It is just like the game never stopped being developed back in 2007. [music] Basically, just like we want from a classic plus. But before Jagex add

[03:01] anything to the game, they poll the player base and if a supermajority vote yes, the thing goes in. If it's at all contentious, it gets thrown in the bin. And ultimately, the player is the arbiter of what goes into the game. As

[03:16] saved them from numerous mistakes. The types of mistakes that most game publishers do just run into headfirst. As an example, in 2021 they called on a fan developer to pull down his HD mod because they were working on their own

[03:30] HD upgrades. Players and creators naturally revolted en masse and Jagex reversed course within a single day. And they actually reversed course so hard that they celebrated the mod developer's work and they shared the release date

[03:45] for the mod. That's kind of crazy. And in a similar vein just a year later, they saw everyone using third-party clients that added features to the game. So, instead of fighting back against that, they laid out ground rules, they

[03:57] published an approved client list, and they established what sorts of features they considered to be off-limits. That's a really good way of doing it. And by listening to their players and reacting essentially instantly, they are

[04:10] protecting themselves from their own hubris. Though, obviously, it hasn't been a road without bumps, but it is the road by which they have arrived at record-breaking numbers. You see, their concurrent player counts are freely

[04:22] accessible, and in January of this year, they hit just shy of 260k players logged in at once. And that was not a freak accident judging by the chart. They came comparison, that would have made them the fifth highest played game on Steam

[04:39] right now, and in the top 70 for all-time peak player counts. Now, that level, but it's absolutely one of the strongest games in our industry. And

[04:51] hell, they're even winning the hardest war MMOs pretty much ever have to fight, seriously, the community has been convinced that recent anti-bot measures have actually ended the botting scourge, which is kind of crazy and not a thing

[05:05] you usually see in an MMO. And on that development front, OSRS is probably one of the most satisfying games to play. It's up there with Warframe and Path of Exile, you know, devs who really seem to get the players and quite consistently

[05:18] make what people actually want. That ability to take on player feedback is the first ingredient to their special sauce. What's the second one then? Because it will take something mighty to let [music] an ancient western-focused

[05:31] point-and-click MMO somehow topple the huge incumbent that is World of Warcraft. Yeah, that's what the man in charge wants to do. Well, as it turns because a player in a Steam review basically puts it better than I ever

[05:45] could. Quote, "If art is about recontextualizing our most basic relations to the world in a new light or a setting, then this game is truly art. It's the most perfectly balanced mirror for showing how we understand striving

[05:59] for something or work as a whole." Quite the review. Now, there's another straightforward that just simply says, "Black tar heroin in video game form."

[06:11] So, how do they manage to do this? I mean, if an MMORPG can have one heart at the very core of the experience, it's probably work. Work that manages to hit both parts of the brain, that's [music] fun and that's meaningful. That's kind

[06:25] of the hook, the bit that keeps people playing for years and decades instead of basically, you put in work and that work, that time, it actually matters. MMOs are specifically best at this

[06:37] because other people in the world make that feel so much more real. And it's that addictive work loop, that's where RuneScape takes the fight to World of And fundamentally, I think it's where RuneScape can win.

[06:52] This story has been building. Busy last year, Mad Season made a video on, quote, "The Great Exodus." The TLDR here is that a ton of classic [music] streamers and players basically got bored with the wait for Classic Plus and decided to

[07:05] give Old School RuneScape a shot and basically fell in love with the thing. And as Mad Season leads with, a lot of the reason why is basically progression. World of Warcraft is a seasonal game in its modern incarnation. Every patch, you

[07:20] lose most of your progress, right? And it can be reset very quickly. Now, most MMOs are primarily seasonal, which can make the whole thing feel rather Sisyphian. The popular line is, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." But, the

[07:33] point is that Sisyphus was being tortured. Rolling a boulder up a hill every day only to start fresh in in morning is literally a form of torture. It was meaningless labor with no progress.

[07:46] cheating death. Now, OSRS avoids that Sisyphian element like the plague. Progress in the game is horizontal, and updates do their best

[07:58] not to invalidate earlier content. What that means is that when the world grows, it grows forever. Whereas in WoW, every time the world grows, it functionally shrinks because all previous [music] content is rendered obsolete.

[08:10] OSRS also avoids FOMO where possible, whereas World of Warcraft pretty much adds more limited events than it does permanent [music] content at this stage. Basically, OSRS's design philosophy is anti-modern. They do what works, they

[08:26] trust the process, and have been rewarded in droves for having the courage to do that. Now, that's not saying they haven't adopted great things up. They've got timed leagues, they've got Ironman, [music]

[08:39] but those things are fun additional things, they don't detract from the core development philosophy. So then, the experience of playing the game is pure permanent progress. It's problem-solving, efficient grinding,

[08:53] accomplishments [music] with no fear of that work ever being lost to an update. Basically, number go up in a pure, permanent form with loads of complexity

[09:05] to work around with. There's gathering, crafting, a rich economy, tick manipulation, combat, lengthy quests, and everything you might imagine. And all of it is abhorrently grindy. It takes a massive wall of knowledge to get

[09:18] into, and hundreds, if not sometimes thousands, of hours to reach any semblance of done. It basically is one of the deepest and grindiest games ever put on the planet, and that seems [music] to work for it

[09:32] more than it works against it. And the CEO does seem to [music] know exactly how people play the game. >> There's a hope there's millions of that have got Excel open on one screen and Old School on the other. And I think

[09:45] what we do. >> Now, naturally, that means it's not a game for everyone. A low-effort grindy game that will burn through your mouse's rated click count faster than you can ever imagine is, in some ways, niche.

[10:01] But I think the fundamental human thing of number go up is fairly universal and OSRS obviously [music] wins on that front. But aspects of it are niche and that's why I think it's not going to take WoW's throne in the way that, say,

[10:14] this video. I don't think it's going to cause a mass exodus of WoW players. Instead, I think it is going to go toe-to-toe with World of Warcraft over a toe-to-toe with World of Warcraft over a new audience and for that audience, it

[10:28] might just win. John Bellamy called RuneScape the second [music] biggest MMO brand in the world and until this year, it actually managed and until this year, it actually managed that with zero Asian presence, literally

[10:41] zero. Then they released RuneScape Dragon Isles, which is a spin-off game. It's basically an online co-op survival crafting spin-off thing. Think of Valheim, I guess. It did well in the west, but then they tried to put it out

[10:53] 40% of their day one sales were in China [music] and 20% since. So, they have a say it's one that they took with ease. The game did super well over there.

[11:05] Meanwhile, on our end, Blizzard haven't been able to release a Warcraft game that draws in new players, kind of ever, actually. As an example, we know from our leak that Warcraft Chronicles and an Arthas game are in the pipeline, it

[11:18] would seem, but they're lagging behind. Both companies want to launch global PC and console games to onboard people to their MMO IP and with Dragon Isles, Jagex beat Blizzard to the punch. Part of their future is growing out there And

[11:32] part of Blizzard's goal to grow Warcraft relies on new people coming in. But get out anything that isn't Wow. Though of course when it comes to Asia, Blizzard has a strong presence already, but it is a historical one. It's more

[11:46] about reactivating lapsed players while Jagex are out there scooping up potential future players. And to be honest, I think it's clear that if OSRS went fully in and hosting Asian servers and supporting that market, they would

[11:58] likely see pretty monumental audience growth. And that would be growth from the same audience that Blizzard are relying on reaching. I expect that say Classic Plus will probably hit China even harder than it will hit us in the

[12:10] west. So, [music] I don't think I'm like dooming on Wow here. This is far less Runescape, [music] seeing what they want to do, and finding out does it have a path to be number one? And the result of the analysis is

[12:24] that it probably does have a path to being number one. It would be hard. I don't think it is a surefire thing or is even extremely likely, happen. But there's one final bit to this puzzle because I actually lied to

[12:40] you at the start of the video. Earlier, I spun a bit of a story. I said that their CEO John Bellamy was a venture capital guy. And that's truth. And [snorts] that's because he actually

[12:53] And [snorts] that's because he actually worked at Jagex years and years ago and set things straight. You see, Jagex has had a troubled history with CEOs and being sold off to different parent companies. But right now, it seems like

[13:07] they're on the up and up. Now, the reason I bring that up is because how decisions get made is really important. So, on that, in his podcast episode with The Games Businesses Chris Dring, he's asked about a leading from the heart

[13:21] quote that another Jagex exec gave. And his response was perfect. Here's what he >> Doesn't feel safe. I think it feels safe to have numbers making the decisions for you're not really making decisions anyway. You're just letting consequences

[13:34] roll out of data points, which is unfortunate. I think for us, leading can really do well. >> Now, here's where it gets interesting. [music] as the new CEO was actually remove massive amounts of

[13:47] when I say Runescape, I mean the current less popular product, not OSRS. They had things like the daily treasure hunter money sink that was completely removed in January of this year alongside tons of other money squeezing progress items

[14:01] and things that were just Now, he since revealed that it was a major hit to their revenue, but that it's a hit they were willing to take to reset the game to where it needed to be. It still has monetization, yes, but they fixed

[14:14] the PR issue of having way too much that just felt wrong. And what that means is that in general, the PR out of Runescape is now almost entirely positive. And even if it dips, they do try to make sure it recovers. The trend line is

[14:27] currently pointing up with almost no asterisks. And you know what? It's impossible to imagine saying the same thing for Blizzard right now. So, I'd say this, if I had to make a five or 10-year bet right now, does Runescape

[14:40] overtake WoW as a global MMO brand? I would hesitate. But I would not be able to say yes. World of Warcraft is gigantic. [music] Of of course it is. Classic Plus is just around the corner, and if it's done

[14:53] right, Classic Plus would be Blizzard's OSRS equivalent. It China. And if they can pull it off, I think it will be way more numbers than OSRS will bring in. Then there's the television project push. There's other

[15:07] games that apparently are going to be a thing. If they can actually knock all that stuff out the park or even just do a pretty good job, then WoW probably the universe. After all, Runescape for all of its

[15:20] strengths, is not the IP, would say one of the most famous king killers in the world. But ultimately, I will say this. It's great to hear the CEO of another company that seems to be doing really well saying that he wants to take out

[15:35] dethrone it. That's good because it's competition. competition. That OSRS can do that will light a fire underneath Classic Plus. And if things work out well, that'll

[15:47] mean that we just got a better [music] Classic Plus. So, Blizz, don't take your success for granted. And now that Season of Discovery and multiple seasons of happened, well, mess up Classic Plus,

[16:00] and I think a lot of the audience will simply have just had their fill and perhaps move on to OSRS. We have certainly seen evidence that that segment of the wild player base can't kind of will because they already

[16:13] have. Just see the mad season video. But if another dash of wild intrigue is more your speed, check out this video next. It's all about the PTR and the very obvious dangers of it that I think are quite certainly hurting wild. So, if

[16:27] Blizzard does want to keep competitive, I think it's a problem they need to I think it's a problem they need to solve.