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Old School RuneScape broke record numbers with over 185k concurrent players
@Old School RuneScape:
Surreal to think that 10 years later we're still breaking record numbers of members!We've just added another 18 Trailblazer: Reloaded worlds for you all to enjoy.Thanks to everyone for playing and enjoy the dopamine over the next few weeks 🥹 pic.twitter.com/gFsp8uTBJy
More information.
Its pretty damning that their legacy product is more popular than their current product. People really didn’t like the evolution of combat stuff.
Personally I loved it, to a point.
It was infinitely more engaging than the point and click and maybe the odd spec and weapon switch.
But fighting the legacy tick system made even the new combat mechanics feel slow and sluggish.
To get good you had to memorise combat rotations and switches and equip a certain weapon for one ability then switch to another. Beyond the middle tier bosses the game gets really really sweaty and I just didnt care enough to get good. I still login most years around christmas time for the nostalgia. I wish I played more and did all the quests (to get the quest cape) I have a max combat character with quite a few 99’s like 10-15.
It's not surprising at all when you understand that while 2007scape was able to avoid gambling MTX, the main game (RS3) is ridden with it to the point of absurdity. Like, the "original" game basically revolves around microtransaction content at this point.
On the other hand, OSRS's only mtx is "bonds", which you can buy with real money, and then sell for GP, which other players redeem for membership. And this was only seen as acceptable to the community because it was offered in exchange for Free to Play worlds.
I wouldn't be surprised if RuneScape 3 is more profitable even with fewer players due to microtransactions.
The bonds have actually been really successful for Jagex as a more benign version of MTX.
As a back-of-the-envelope: the Runelite market data says there are ~16k bonds traded per day. Runelite captures about half of trading volume, and the average bond is flipped at most once (doubling the transaction count), so we'll (very generously) say that they cancel each other out. At a price of $8 USD per bond, that's ~$128k revenue per day.
A more realistic estimate would probably be ~$200k/day, since many bonds aren't traded on the GE in the first place, equaling $73m in annual revenue. Add in ~$1-2m per month from membership charges, and we're looking at ~$85-95m total for OSRS out of Jagex's $155m (=£125m) stated revenue for 2021. RS3 is probably much more valuable per player, but OSRS is definitely pulling in more money on the whole.
Given that it is in active development, with new features being added, I'm not sure I would call OSRS a "legacy product".
Trailblazer is really fun. They are separate worlds where you start over from scratch as an ironman, but there are xp bonuses and unlockable relics that make the game much easier, so you can get to more advanced content pretty quickly. I'm not surprised it's getting some record numbers.
OSRS is definitely better than RS3 in my opinion. The community polls being the final say on content additions has done a good job of keeping some of the worst trends of RS3 from creeping in.
Update: they hit 200k.