After Nearly 20 Years, RuneScape Just Had Its Best Ever Year

Jagex has revealed that RuneScape, the eternal MMO, has just had its most successful year to date, nearly twenty years after it was first released.

The game’s fifth successive year of growth has seen revenue increased by 19.4% year-on-year to £110.9million in 2019, with operating profits hitting £48.9million, an overall increase of 4.5%. People spending thousands of dollars on microtransactions of course doesn’t hurt these figures.

On top of this, RuneScape subscribers grew by half a million with Jagex also recruiting 11% more people.

Phil Mansell, Jagex CEO, said:

“Jagex continues its journey of growth and investment and 2019 was an extraordinary year as we welcomed more players to our living games of RuneScape and Old School RuneScape than ever before, taking the company over the £100m+ revenue mark for the first time in our history. Attracting more players and, importantly, keeping our loyal gaming communities excited and engaged for the long-term speaks to the success of our living games ethos. This is the bedrock of our strategy and it is built on putting players first. In turn, this has attracted world-class talent to further bolster the amazing Jagex team and fuel further success.”

Also in 2019, Runescape reached membership highs on desktop and mobile, and Old School RuneScape reached a record high amount of daily players in 2019.

RuneScape will turn 20 years in January 2021, and while the jury’s out on whether the planet will actually reach that date, it’s highly likely that people will be playing RuneScape until the bitter end.

As someone who vividly remembers playing RuneScape in IT class in middle school too many years ago to count, I didn’t think that I would be sat here writing about its continued success almost two decades later. Life is crazy.

RuneScape is available now on PC and mobile devices.