Interview: Jagex’s Henrique Olifiers Discusses the Past, Present and Future of RuneScape

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned during the demo that you have a plan to continually increase the graphics quality, introduce physics, particles, etc. Do you feel that once all the upgrades are complete that you can appeal to a broader demographic beyond teens with lower-end machines?

Henrique Olifiers: Probably so. The idea is that we keep the game upgraded graphically, as you said, over time. The thing is, if you look at the PC market right now, the boxed market, every company out there is complaining about how fast it’s shrinking.

They’re shifting into consoles and so on, right?

In my opinion, that’s because they’re focusing on the wrong end of the spectrum the machine install base.

If you create a game that requires a massive processor, and a massive 3D card, not just that, the skills to have the right drivers and the right setup, that adds up to 3-5% of the installed user base of the PC. How can you complain that you’re not selling enough?

So, RuneScape has this mindset that we always cater to the lower-end of the spectrum. Even RuneScape HD you can run with a 1.5ghz machine, 256MB of RAM, and a GeForce 3, which is a setup that is five or six years old.

You’ll get a good graphical result out of that, and you’ll be able to run it on any machine you can buy today, and most older machines.

That’s why we have this massive userbase of six million active players. It’s not by chance. It’s not because we’re doing magic. It’s because we are targeting our game at the right portion of the market: People who want to play an MMO, but don’t have a high-end machine to do so.

The MMO Gamer: Aside from the graphics aspect of it, do you feel that the gameplay is robust enough to appeal to people who have previously stayed away from RuneScape for aesthetic reasons?

Henrique Olifiers: That’s a tricky question, I have to say. There’s two answers to it…

RuneScape is a game that came out in 2001, and got an uplift, a change, in 2004.

So, some quests that you’ll find in the game date back to 2004. Those quests are definitely less appealing than the more recent stuff we’ve added into the game. We add new quests, new content, every two weeks.

If you ask me, if any hardcore MMO player would appreciate the new quests that we have done in the past year or so, which is usually found by medium level players, I would say yes, they would enjoy it.

They will find lots of fun in that content.

If you ask me if they’re going to find fun gameplay in the early quests that we made that are still in the game, which you usually find in the early stages in the game, because the game grew from the middle upwards, I would say it’s probably not as appealing as the other quests.

It boils down to the gamer’s taste. If he’s really into the game, and can invest some time with the game, I will say that a long gameplay session of four, six times, we’d show him things he wouldn’t be thinking about finding in RuneScape.

The MMO Gamer: Could you give a rough breakdown, percentage wise, of the people who play for free in the ad-based version of the game, vs. the people who actually subscribe?

Henrique Olifiers: From the six million active players, the last number I had was one million fifty thousand subscribers—that’s four or five days ago—those are subscribers that pay five dollars a month.

The MMO Gamer: Those are substantial numbers. What sort of team do you have supporting the game behind that?

Henrique Olifiers: Jagex has two studios in Cambridge, two buildings very close to one another. We have almost 400 people working there. 375 people working on RuneScape. From those 375 I would say that 250 of them are directly engaged with RuneScape.

The MMO Gamer: Within the past year or so there’s been a lot of talk about the MMO genre being in a possible shift towards digital distribution, and free to play supported by advertising, with microtransactions on the side…

But, for RuneScape, that’s not anything new, it’s what you’ve been doing since the beginning. Why do you feel it’s taken the rest of the market so long to catch on to what seems to be a successful model on your part?

Henrique Olifiers: This is a personal view of mine. I think that the market has a lot of the “follow the leader” mindset. They see something working, like World of Warcraft, they all go after that. Jagex, as a company, and Runescape has been very low-profile.

We’ve been quite popular amongst our players, but not as a company among other companies. When they started to see the numbers on NPD and MMOGChart and all that, they say, “What’s RuneScape? What is this growing so fast, and so solidly?”

They realize that we, which they didn’t know about, were doing something right. So they’re now trying to catch up, offering free entry to the games so the players can experience as much as they want and keep playing for free if they want, and offering either subscription-based or microtranscation-based kind of revenue.

Some of them talk about advertisement, which is also a revenue stream for us, advertisement is a very small revenue stream. From our know-how, even with six million players, advertising is strong, but not as strong as subscriptions. Subscriptions is the model to go for us.

Microtransactions wise, yes, we think there is some potential there, but that potential needs to be explored by an MMO designed around microtransactions. We cannot shoehorn microtransactions into an existing MMO. That doesn’t work.

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