Runescape

Did you know Runescape, admired by BBC 2 Controller Roly Keating, is also beloved of nine million active players?

I flippin' didn't (thanks, Beenabadbunny ;)). Hoo boy.

Seems free-to-play MMOGs may have a larger market than otherwise perceived...

Comments

[John H.]

Runescape seems to be free for the basic game, but there appear to be a large number of features available only to subscribers.

As for where he got that info, I cannot say, for most of the article you linked to is similarly open only to subscribers....

[Seb Potter]

I'm not sure where that 9 million figure comes from. When I applied for a job with Jagex I was told that there are currently just in excess of 500,000 subscribers. In fact, from the Jagex corporate page http://www.jagex.com/corporate/history.ws:

"Our ambition for 2006 is to exceed 850,000 subscribers for RuneScape."

[kim]

MMOGChart has them down at ~900k subscribers, beat only by WoW, Lineage and Lineage II.

In their press releases, they claim 9M monthly players. Not sure the discrepancy, but it's either that subscriptions doesn't include free accounts (a 10% conversion to paid is awesome if that's the case) or that 9M monthly players is their 900k users logging in on avg 10 times per month to play.

Welcome to teh wild world of MMO stats! :-)

[Alice]

The 9 million comes from a Jagex employee, and a Wonderland commenter, Beenabadbunny here.

Subs apparently doesn't include free accounts.

[beenabadbunny]

I don't have exact figures to hand as I'm not in the office, but last I checked, RuneScape had about 825,000 subscribers, each paying USD 5.00 (or local equivalent) per month for extra game content and improved customer support.

There is also a free (banner-ad-supported) version of the game with a limited game map and cut-down features. In the last four weeks, around nine million unique free accounts have been logged into and played at least once. Many players use more than one character, of course, so there aren't nine million individuals playing RS. Probably not that far off, though.

[Blipo]

There are over 800K subscribers to RuneScape, subscribers being players who pay a monthly fee. There are estimated at about 7500K different players altogether, and around nine million accounts altogether.

[Niall]

Indeed,

I used to work for Jagex and they do not include f2p (free to play) players in their subscription figures. The number of 9 million comprises the total number of accounts that are active within a certain timeframe (say 1 month). Indeed, google released figures highligting how more people run RuneScape related searches compared with WoW.

The total number of subscribers is approaching 1 million and when I was there was generally increasing at the rate of 5000 subscribers a week.

Niall

[benas]

fgooh