RuneScape sees heavy profits for 2009

Jagex, the company behind long-running MMO RuneScape, is seeing happy faces all around these days. To absolutely nobody's surprise, profits from past years have seen a sharp rise and the latest round of numbers is no exception.

RuneScape has been a growing success for Jagex, and Gamesbrief recently took a look at the company's profits for March 2008 - March 2009: "UK studio Jagex [...] generated £38.4 million in revenues ($59.3M) and £18 million in profits ($27.8M) during the March 2008 to March 2009 period." That's a pretty impressive figure, particularly when you take into account how far Jagex has come from £5.2 million ($8M) in revenues and a £2.7 million profit ($4.2M) back in 2004.

Jagex definitely has RuneScape to thank for the majority of this, of course. 94% of this most recent round of profits came from RuneScape subscriptions, according to the Gamesbrief report. Considering that the game is free-to-play, the figures are nothing short of impressive.

Take a look at Gamesbrief for the full story.

Reader Comments (9)

I've always considered this s bit of a joke since we had someone join our guild and tell us he was a Runescape veteran so 'he knew all about raiding'

That said, I didn't realize that this game had grown at such a fast pace, so I might actually give it a second look.

Jagex, iPad/iPhone client, you'll double those numbers overnight, pesky flash!

runescape was my first mmo, i remember spending hours on it after school. it was always exciting to play and it really got me into the whole mmorpg genre. i'm glad to see runescape doing well even though i don't go on it anymore.

That's impressive when you consider that it's one of the ugliest games to look at. That says nothing about the gameplay of course, but one of the biggest complaints I hear about mmo games is graphics. If they aren't stunning people will bitch left and right about how fail it is based on how it looks. Guess looks aren't everything when you are talking over 27 million in profit.

Ya the graphics are just horrible, the concept art in this articles picture is 100x better than the in-game graphics will ever be in that game.

I played it for a long time when I was younger and I have to say the gameplay is pretty shallow too though so it's not just ugly.

At least they upgraded the graphics from the original, although I think since it is low quality, I just as well would prefer the original wannabe-Ultima style.
But anyway, I had a brief look at the game, and must say, I am pretty impressed actually. If I weren't so busy with other games, I might play this for a while.

I also started my mmo "career" with runescape, as did several of my friends, and all of us love it (even though we don't play it as much these days, focusing on other mmos). I have found that it is very hard to actually convince another mmo gamer to try it, since they look at trailers and complain about the graphics. Actually, I have yet to manage to convince anyone who has played another mmo with better graphics to give it a chance, yet everyone I know who has tried it either loves it or at least likes it.

Nice to see someone other than blizzard thriving.
Never played RuneScape before, but kudos to them.

For as many complaints about how Runescape sucks, it's trash, whatever else people have thrown at it, it has been the very model of how a F2P made by an indie company can be very successful. It also shows that graphics are not everything, and that when you make a game that can literally be played on a 10 year old system, it will attract customers.

While Runescape isn't my cup of tea I'm really glad to hear that they're doing so well. It's nice when a different model works despite grumblings about how there's no way a free-to-play model could work in the face of the WoW juggernaut.

Runescape. DDO. Etc. Have shown that there is plenty of room out there for different games and models.

Congrats again to them.

RuneScape sees heavy profits for 2009

Reader Comments (9)

Posted: Apr 15th 2010 10:08PM Mr Angry said

Posted: Apr 16th 2010 12:52AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Apr 16th 2010 1:04AM whateveryousay said

Posted: Apr 16th 2010 1:10AM Necromas said

Posted: Apr 16th 2010 3:04AM Greeen said

Posted: Apr 16th 2010 4:57AM kasapina said

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