Shrub's former M&A darling - Runescape

There’s been some drama in the OG online skinners box world lately— the current CEO of Jagex floated the dumbest sounding update. They even talked about running in game advertising and monetization of additional account recovery features.

This is also the person that most former players attribute to destroying the game previously as he was in charge of monetization strategies. Specifically, as Vice President of RuneScape at the time, Mansell was heavily involved in the company’s pivot toward integrating microtransactions and monetization models into RuneScape. This shift included features like the Squeal of Fortune, which debuted in 2012.

They’re attempting to really juice ARPU again, so if I had to guess the current owners either already want to sell it or are trying to find a return in the most ham-fisted way they possibly could.

• 2011: Insight Venture Partners.

• 2016: Shanghai Hongtou Network Technology (Zhongji Holding).

• 2020: The Carlyle Group.

• 2021: Platinum Equity Group

• 2024 CVC Capital Partners.

This blog previously ventured into concepts of game theory, and I feel like no one could understand it. So, I’ll talk about game theory with a game and a theory as to why Jagex can’t keep an owner to save its own life.

When RuneScape originally got popular, there were almost zero online games and the whole gaming industry was just a lot smaller. Steam hadn’t even been out for more than a few years at the peak of Runescape’s popularity— which is now regarded as the central repository of online gaming. This is, if I had to guess, probably why these guys can’t seem to stop throwing it around like a hot potato.

What RuneScape really is as a game that’s a vicious skinners box that is harvesting the nostalgia and obsessive-compulsive tendencies of a group of people that picked up that game nearly 10-20 years ago. The whole cohort is aging— gamers growing up today for the most part will not be picking up OSRS as a game to get into as they have in the days of yester year.

Now I have to respect OSRS as it’s probably one of the best skinner boxes of all time. If you didn’t play Runescape when you were like 11-19 and look at something like OSRS today, what you see is probably one of the most repetitive and boring looking MMORPG’s that exists. But the recreation of OSRS in 2013 was like a hard factory reset of a games previous state that massively revitalized the active player base. The reason that happened and worked had nothing other to do than nostalgia. Even though in present day form it’s not really recognizable, OSRS is still Jagex’s main game. But it won’t last forever. They might be able to factory reset again or reformulate it one last time to make it work again as well as it did before (TBD) but nothing lasts forever. The current CEO who gave us all squeal of fortune is trying out this monetization strategy that’s really making everyone upset. Check it out if interested in the gaming sector as RuneScape is an anomaly when compared to most other games out there.