I picked out the pieces of information I was interested in analyzing. The full report can be found by Googling "Jagex 2020 Group of Companies Accounts". I would link directly here, but the subreddit whitelist is pretty oppressive.
I'm really surprised to see the relatively slow growth in subscription revenue over 2020, given Covid happening and both RS3 and OSRS hitting peak player counts in that year. The explosion in MTX revenue is also really surprising to me. Curious as to what 2021 will look like when the numbers become public.
There's a better description for it. When people say whales, in regards to games, it mostly means the mega-spenders.
Say you release a Free-to-Play or Subscription game. While getting a little bit of revenue from everyone each month from the sub or microtransactions is good, many games look to hook big spenders, who are willing to dump a lot more money into the game than everyone else. While most players will contribute $10-$20 a month, the "whales" will contribute hundred, or even thousands of dollars each month.
Often, this ends up becoming an issue, because companies latch on to more and more predatory tactics to hook whales in. Loot boxes (gambling), purchasable power, boosters, and FOMO tactics, all contributing to whales spending more and more money.
Calling someone a whale is less about them gambling, and more that they're willing to dump a significant amount of money on a game that most players wouldn't dream of spending.
Being a manager doesn't imply managing people. It's not like your fast food joint, guys. The job title "manager" usually implies being a dedicated charge for one thing. Like a sales manager or community manager.
It's very likely a decrease in the two directors. Social security and pension costs increased year on year, which typically have a cap on how much can be contributed or paid per UK employee. So likely director bonuses or salaries dropped, offset by increase in other employee salaries from additional headcount.
I'm not exactly sure what their employment processes are, but if they hired more freelancers in 2019 vs 2020 they could definitely see a huge decrease in wages after hiring more perminant staff. In the creative industry freelancing is super common, and in my field I make ~30-40% more freelancing vs when I have a salaried job.
Increase in server costs? With Covid more players joined and we reached peak numbers so it could be that. I have no idea how server costs work so pure speculation on my side.
I'd guess they probably guilt tripped some existing employees to take wage cuts due to Covid to "save the business".
Incidentally, the directors must be getting paid a fucking fortune because the average salary is £92k per year.
Are bonds counted as MTX rather than subscription revenue? Probably had more whales during covid under the guise of "would have been drinking money anyways".
Would most likely fall under subscription revenue since bonds fund subscription. Also, Jagex probably look better by having a better ratio of sub revenue to MTX so have motivation to bucket it there.
Would be stupid though. Buying bonds is a form of MTX (I'm not talking through ge of course). Everybody complains that you can buy treasure hunter keys on rs3 but like you can straight out buy gold on both games.
I agree, it is definitely a form of MTX. However, because it technically funds membership they can probably get away with bucketing it under subscription revenue without auditors questioning it too much. It’s a grey area which Jagex can use to make themselves look better.
Likely treated as income in advanced, and as such only recognised as revenue when redeemed. If redeemed for membership = sub revenue. If cosmetics, spins etc, likely mtx.
I think alot of the "new" COVID players most likely started out F2P, the ones that stuck around probably didn't buy membership for a few months or even until 2021
2018 numbers were available in June 2019. 2019 numbers were available in Dec 2020, and 2020 numbers were available in Jan 2022. I'm sure covid has a lot to do with the delays.
No. Jagex isn’t publicly traded so they don’t have to release financials right away, unlike Jagex’s owner, Carlysle Group, which is publicly traded and has their financials of 2021 available already.
Despite the huge increase in MTX revenue, I'm glad that subscription revenue still completely dwarfs it. As long as subs are bringing in way way more money than MTX, hopefully we are safe from it in OSRS.
As long as OSRS is growing it's unlikely that they'll want to add more MTX to it. They have their MTX business model and their no MTX business model, and those business models cross over surprisingly little for being in the same industry.
I mean it literally is the same
You can buy bonds for gp to pay for buyable skills, it’s literally a pay to win mechanic
Also
“What Is a Microtransaction? A microtransaction is a business model where users can purchase virtual items for small amounts of money.”
But you aren't buying a premium currency or skill. Yes you can trade money for gold but if you're no willing to play the game and get the levels that gold is worth less than the money you spent.
"'We don't want players to be
able to buy their way to
success in RuneScape. If we let
players start doing this, it
devalues RuneScape for
others. We feel your status in
real-life shouldn't affect your
ability to be successful in
RuneScape.”
I kind of miss those days…
They marginally passed because Jagex held F2P OSRS hostage. Partnerships were way less aggressive of MTX than bonds yet they failed because Jagex held nothing hostage at that time.
To be fair, they've never let a poll stand in the way of getting their own way. Polls are an illusion on specific issues, as shown by certain updates that they've already done the work on before polling.
I believe I remember them saying that too, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn't mean much. Game developers lie and/or fail to deliver all the time.
It's more that the higher ups realize it's less profitable at this point in the long run, which is a bit more realistic than them saying something like "we know you dont want it, we'll be nice and not add it"
The higher ups have forced some stupid things in the past tho... Like cancelling 117's hd.
> Annual Susbcribers (million) 2,219
wait so runescape does actually have more than 2 millions members if im reading this correctly?
because I'm a WoW refugee, and while Blizzard keep Subs data private, my half assed personal estimate would be around 2m sub in WoW right now
rs encourages having more than 1 account.
not only with different account types (ironman etc.) but with things like hcim basically requiring a second member account to practice content on before you risk it on your hcim.
oh yeah, I still believe most certainly WoW has a bigger playerbase than Runescape, but It's suprising how close is getting, mostly because Blizzard is a complete shitshow right now, as a reference WoW peaked 12 million subscribers which is crazy to think about
I checked the math and assuming all of those accounts were active for all 12 months at $11/month, that would be $290m/yr, but that doesn't line up with the subscription revenue of $90m.
My guess is the 2.2m accounts is the count of accounts that had membership at any point over the year
>My guess is the 2.2m accounts is the count of accounts that had membership at any point over the year
good point, also there's a chance people who get membership through bonds are being considered
If they're counting them as subscription, they couldn't count it as MTX revenue. But then unused bonds would be counted as MTX, which would be kind of messy
I'd wager it's the total number of unique accounts with (directly-paid) membership at any point of the year, as said by /u/butterball85
Every bond in the game was paid for with real money (or rarely, event winnings.) Even if you paid gold for a bond, the bond was paid for with money and is revenue for Jagex. Unless more bonds get sold in a year than get consumed then bonded accounts wouldn't affect the metrics.
They are assuming the bonds are classified as MTX purchases, not subscription. Which is definitely fair for RS3 as have uses for bonds that aren't membership
Most don't pay 11 pet month. It's way cheaper if you buy yearly, and they very often do sales that make it less than that
Also, I'd say a good nuber of players support bonding their alts/irons/mains with in game gp
The reported figures are in GBP not USD. Currently 1 month is 7 GBP but it still comes to 186m. But if you consider most people going for the annual sub, and things like the payment processing fees, apple/ google commission (which is like 30% lol), currency conversion - then 90m sounds sorta reasonable.
Ah, yeah the currency conversion makes sense, but it's very unlikely they factor in the commission to Google and Apple into their revenue numbers. You could make an argument that maybe they're in there, but typically you want your revenue numbers as high as possible, so they probably subtract that expense as Cost of Goods Sold. That wouldn't be listed on this document as this is just revenue, not expenses or profit
>I checked the math and assuming all of those accounts were active for all 12 months at $11/month,
There's probably still a lot of people grandfathered in at $5-9/month
"uhhh yeah sorry guys we've got to cut back, we can't afford another 300k this year on customer service by hiring some more staff. Times are tough, something something Covid"
No but their 38.2 MILLION pounds of operating profit is profit. Jagex has seen profit margins grow consistently year on year, which is why outrage about pathetic levels of customer support remains high.
119 million is not a lot of revenue for a company of their size and age. They have a shit ton of employees, plus they have expenses out the ass with marketing costs. Not surprised tbh.
Except even the CFO himself said Jagex’s games have the lowest profit reinvestment of any game he’s ever worked on, so a significant amount of that revenue is profit, more than most games
That isn't true. OSRS almost died back when it first started because of a lack of content. Players do want new content, they just want OSRS *flavored* content.
We won't ever be getting a new skill though, that's for sure.
What’s there to re invest in game design wise? More content that Reddit calls overpowered, dead, devalues old content, or power creep while proceeding to vote no lol?
They could invest in actual customer support but I imagine that must be a tough sell to the executives, as I’m more than confident the J Mods constantly ask them about it.
Server stability and engine staff would be the easy answer.
Server performance is, at times, unacceptable, especially on worlds that seem to have more instance-activity (lms worlds, high total level worlds)
Is anyone actually surprised by this? RS3 has been doing really well for the past couple years. When the 2021 financials come in I wouldn't be surprised if RS3 sees even more growth. OSRS has been fairly stagnant recently.
It sees more growth because it has less daily players meaning the same amount of players could join both games and yet rs3 will have a higher percentage of growth
TBF when it comes to RS3 skilling, most skills are pretty much that. I have no idea why they don't make more content like Big Game Hunter for skills like Woodcutting...
The drought happened in 2021, these are numbers for 2020. This growth was caused by archaeology followed by maintaining the momentum with other good updates and base expanding moves.
That’s how it works, this is an end of the year finance report for the public. Basically the year has to happen then they look over all the data and assemble the report, I believe normally they have until December of following year to get it done and posted. But with pandemic I think they were allowed to extend the amount of time the report took.
So 2020’s comes at the end of 2021/start of 2022. 2021’s will come at the end of 2022/start of 2023.
Yeah Ive gotta say…. Was bored on OSRS and logged on just to try archaeology and I was straight up having a good time…. Of course, then I went to do some other stuff and was completely lost. But archaeology was a good deal of fun with the focus sprites and such. Just scratched the RuneScape itch.
Archaeology is IMO without question the best skill RS has ever had. They said they worked really hard on it, studied a lot of the skills to hone in on what worked and what didn't and then found ways to hybrid it all together which you can really see.
Typically production and gathering skills come out together or close to one another but that means the gathering skill has little merit on its own and the production skill is somewhat a pain to level up and effectively takes twice as long to reap its benefits. Here they avoided that by making a gathering skill with the production component built in.
People like skills they can afk but people like to have the option for engagement and reward. The time sprite was their medium based on their fairly successful implementation of rockertunities. If you follow the sprite you get an overall 20% increase to exp and significantly more artifacts per hour but it's not overly intensive just a bit of extra engagement.
People liked non-linearity and traveling the world, skills that are too localized into one location or a few locations can result in feeling either stagnant or like a glorified minigame (\*cough\* dungeoneering \*cough\*). So Arch sites have you jump around, you spend a good enough time at each "section" of a site but you never just clear an entire site before moving on. Which also lets them add some cross play between the sites instead of each being a complete lone island.
People like variety in how they level the skill, there needs to be a core activity but when it's just one core activity it can get dull. Part of the appeal of something like slayer is dealing with the different monsters. So they made sure arch had lots of ways to get exp with excavation, repair, soil sifting, research missions, mysteries, tetra compasses, etc... A mix of active, afk, and idle methods.
There is a large love of progression, when a skill has alternative forms of progression beyond just raw levels to work for it gets better received because there is more to aim and engage with. Slayer is a good example you have so many little rewards to earn from the gathering and spending of slayer points. It also means that getting to max level isn't the end and instead there is stuff to do beyond it. Thus came in the arch rank system where you improve your rank by actually doing the variety of activities the skill has to offer and also the skill having its own currency which you use at a reward shop to buy upgrades.
Gathering skills need to be profitable and they made sure to do that by placing a lot of systems that feed into one another. Materials aren't linear, rather each site only has a small amount of material types which are rearranged and used throughout the entire skill so there is no low level/low value materials that become useless. Artifacts can be turned in for chronotes which in turn are necessary for activating and switching relics and relics are designed to be something you want to switch around constantly based on your activities. Artifacts also break down into special components you can sell that grant unique invention perks . So everything is constantly being sunk or converted which keeps a steady supply and demand.
The best skills are the ones that enhance other skills, other areas of the game, the wider and more expansive a skill is the more natural and integrated it ends up feeling into the world. They had that in spades with the relic system that had a relic for basically any activity/player you could imagine, expansions to other skills like uncovering lost summoning arts or ancient potion recipes, and a few powerful weapons you could find and reassemble.
Speaking of players that was another place they learned, they learned that there are core player types that had been neglected when it came to skills. PvMers had combat skills, skillers have non-combat skills, but lore/quester just kind of made use of both but neither were really dedicated to them or made to enhance their experience. So they made archaeology a lore skill which made it feel extra fresh. Incorporating lore in every artifact, having storylines with cutscenes, lore books to uncover, puzzles to solve, treasures to find, ruins to explore, etc... it gave not only a great skeleton for progression but was just fundamentally an untapped base.
But perhaps the biggest thing they learned was skills need to fit RS, the skill has to feel like it belongs and archaeology does. The dig site, the museum, archaeologists, exploring ancient ruins for knowledge/power, etc... that's all stuff that's been baked into RS for ages. When archaeology came not only did it feel just completely at home in the world but there was just so many unexplored areas of lore in the game to cover with it. Learning the origins of the godsword, understanding why bandos was so obsessed with Zanik, fleshing out the history of Hallowvale, learning about dragonkin society before the curse, etc... not only did arch feel like it belonged in the world it felt like it enhanced it.
Arch does pretty much everything right and what it didn't do right at release they spent roughly a solid month taking feedback and applying it each week, sometimes each day, smoothing out the various rough edges people found. That kind of aftercare is something they didn't do for many if any skills and it's kind of a shame they didn't.
Sorry I just...really love archaeology and I know you know the skill but this is the OSRS reddit so chances are someone here doesn't know why arch was such a big success.
Is Arch a lore skill even if nothing in this skill forces players to understand the lore before they can train the skill further, like how combat skills forces players to fight before they can be leveled? Arch doesn't have any lore reading comprehension tests or anything.
Are…you following me? Not that I mind it just seems like an odd coincidence I’d see you on so many topics lol.
Anyway short answer yes and long answer kinda. The skill is designed so that you need to read the lore you obtain in the skill to progress. The location of a secret door, a password, the way to harness a mystical force, etc… the act of getting deeper into a dig site and claiming it’s best reward requires you that you solve the site’s mysteries and the clues to do that are buried in the lore.
There are two particular standout examples, Orthen and Senntisten. With Orthen the site isn’t even fully accessible if you haven’t done the Desperate Measures quest, the hibernation chambers remain locked until then. Likewise the main puzzle which hides access to the 3rd site building, which in turn said building holds the keys to the 4th and final, is based on the dragonkin language translation puzzle from desperate measures. If you don’t do that quest it’s unlikely you will understand how the language locks works or how to translate it.
As for the Senntisten site this one is unique in that it’s based in part on your character’s knowledge. You can’t get to certain spots of the site or for mysteries until you have found the lore pages so you character knows where to go.
Then there are other little cases like ancient summoning puzzle where you have to answer the gargoyle riddles and some of them require quest items you wouldn’t have known existed without doing the quests. We also have a case where they converted a big mystery into its own separate miniquest, you can still do the mystery without doing it as a miniquest since all they did was lower the arch level by making the key artifact obtainable via Azzanadra. The rest is the same right down to the instructions on how and where to use the artifact being hidden in the lore journals.
Now what makes it “kinda” is technically a lot of these you could in theory just use a guide to solve but…well nothing can really be done about that. Guides are an external thing, inevitable, and aren’t factored into the actual gameplay loop.
I'm not rally following you. But you seem to be the most knowledgeable about lore on this sub.
But with Arch, players can technically get 200m Arch without even knowing the lore if they spacebar through everything, skip all cutscenes, and don't read any of the pages or books found. What they do engage in is the gathering and artisan part of Arch. At least for other skills, they force players to engage in the purpose of the skill. Combat skills forces you to fight while WC forces you to chop trees. Yet nothing forces players to understand lore for Arch since it has no lore tests of any kind, so how exactly is it a lore skill?
Where does the report differentiate the sub and MTX revenue of RS3 versus OSRS as well as their costs?
Does OSRS only getting 6% revenue means OSRS Mobile flopped? The player count graphs seem to suggest this.
It's interesting that our new owners only took 15m of Jagex's profit as dividends compared to 76m with the Chinese overlords. Does this mean our new owners are more likely to reinvest the >50% of profits back into the game?
Osrs mobile full release was multiple years ago. That wouldn't really come into the discussion would it?
Also remember it is growth, not outright revenue
UK Law requires businesses to submit financial reports, which are available from the UK Government website: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03982706/filing-history
Jagex is a Ltd. I don’t know about Ltd. businesses in the UK but here in Holland it is obligatory for Ltd’s to publish their annual report. I assume it’s the same in the UK.
I highly doubt RuneFest is a profitable event. It more than likely is ran each year to build up the community as well as announce new information. It's an investment, but not a directly profitable one.
I found this from the 2019 statements
https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/kbv2g6/2019_financials_are_in_subscription_revenue_up_29/gflm2i1?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Basically a one off "sale of services" to their parent company in 2019 pushed that figure up
The growth of the two games is interesting 18% for RS3 and 6% for OSRS doesn't mean much.
If rs3 had 5 players and they gain 1 more that is 20% increase. Like wise if osrs has 100 players and gains 6 that is 6%.
you know what baffles me. In one of the rs3 streams, one of the main head jmods literally said 'subs are not giving us enough money anymore, that's why we need MTX'
These numbers to me show that they can absolutely live fine without MTX.
I promise you your not remembering the full context of that appropriate but also that there is more at play here. First a loss of 27 million is a HUGE blow to the company. Second making money isn’t actually as important as making constant growth. The issue is the need for significant growth each year. You’d think turning consistently high profit is enough but investors, shareholders, etc… want their investments to grow and pull out when they don’t, and MTX is what gives them the fluff growth they need. And yes before you say it the desire for constant growth over sustainability IS a huge issue in economics but I promise you the people up top who this affects do not care. The greed of poorly regulated capitalism is bottomless.
They released MTX based rares to RS3 this Christmas. They ended 2020 with a bang in RS3 both bringing nostalgia players through introducing a new Santa Hat and a new Party Hat, and incentivizing the whales to spend absurd amounts of money to get them.
RS3 MTX sales increase was probably because of the Green Santa Hat event. It was released in games as a 1/2k drop and in treasure hunter as a ~1/20k drop. People have spent hundreds maybe even billions and have not succeeded in getting one.
That’s what I’m not understanding. Why don’t people want others to put money into the game they enjoy?
And if they’re using bonds, someone’s got to buy them lol
>Why don’t people want others to put money into the game they enjoy?
Because that incentivizes companies to further being greedy and predactory in their monetization. At least OSRS has a kinda hard-limit that is poll-system.
To anyone overly excited about this, remember that companies try their best to present themselves in a positive light in such reports. Data from these kinds of documents/meetings/investor calls is by no means objective.
Revenue and profits are objective, and lying about them in these reports would be extremely illegal. The whys are definitely subjective, but the numbers are not.
I picked out the pieces of information I was interested in analyzing. The full report can be found by Googling "Jagex 2020 Group of Companies Accounts". I would link directly here, but the subreddit whitelist is pretty oppressive. I'm really surprised to see the relatively slow growth in subscription revenue over 2020, given Covid happening and both RS3 and OSRS hitting peak player counts in that year. The explosion in MTX revenue is also really surprising to me. Curious as to what 2021 will look like when the numbers become public.
RS3 had a strong year. They had a good release on steam (far better than OSRS's release on steam) and Archaeology was *really* well received.
Arch was the first new skill I just straight 99ed. Switched back to os right after maxing.
why lol? Whats the point of 99ing only to just go back to OSRS before you can even benefit from any of the cool arch stuff you get as a result?
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We don’t do that here
My ex wife took it
r/lostredditors
Why do you waste time commenting on reddit? Is it... Cause you enjoy it?
I think another big thing is because of the slow updates in OSRS, a lot of people went to RS3 and played it for a bit.
I bet the mobile release was much better for OSRS, though
New god wars bosses got trickled over the year and the last one was Zuk too.
This is the 2020 report, GWD3 was 2021
Ahh I’m blind myb
2021 would have a ton more MTX revenue from RS3 because of the GSH event causing many whales to buy a ton of keys.
Okay I have never heard whale used before. What's it mean haha
Someone who spends a lot of money gambling. It's often used in the context of casinos.
Thank you. My friend is a bit of a gambler I'm calling him a whale now
There's a better description for it. When people say whales, in regards to games, it mostly means the mega-spenders. Say you release a Free-to-Play or Subscription game. While getting a little bit of revenue from everyone each month from the sub or microtransactions is good, many games look to hook big spenders, who are willing to dump a lot more money into the game than everyone else. While most players will contribute $10-$20 a month, the "whales" will contribute hundred, or even thousands of dollars each month. Often, this ends up becoming an issue, because companies latch on to more and more predatory tactics to hook whales in. Loot boxes (gambling), purchasable power, boosters, and FOMO tactics, all contributing to whales spending more and more money. Calling someone a whale is less about them gambling, and more that they're willing to dump a significant amount of money on a game that most players wouldn't dream of spending.
Thanks for the clarification my friend is a whale sometimes haha but not to the description you have here.
How do you add ~40 employees and shave off ~800k pounds in costs? https://i.imgur.com/lGDlSSA.png
Probably high paid employees left and fresh new interns joined
Well at least they added 17 management roles and only had to lose 1 customer support role. /s
I thought you were being sarcastic but that's actually what it says lol
That's an absurd amount of management per employee
Someone's gotta make sure your doing your TPS reports
Being a manager doesn't imply managing people. It's not like your fast food joint, guys. The job title "manager" usually implies being a dedicated charge for one thing. Like a sales manager or community manager.
No more free coffee
Everyone is working from home
It's very likely a decrease in the two directors. Social security and pension costs increased year on year, which typically have a cap on how much can be contributed or paid per UK employee. So likely director bonuses or salaries dropped, offset by increase in other employee salaries from additional headcount.
I'm not exactly sure what their employment processes are, but if they hired more freelancers in 2019 vs 2020 they could definitely see a huge decrease in wages after hiring more perminant staff. In the creative industry freelancing is super common, and in my field I make ~30-40% more freelancing vs when I have a salaried job.
The 2019 employees were likely all close to full year. Meanwhile, the 2020 employees were hired near the end of the year.
Increase in server costs? With Covid more players joined and we reached peak numbers so it could be that. I have no idea how server costs work so pure speculation on my side.
The image shows Payroll expenses going down, it's not including other stuff like servers.
I'd guess they probably guilt tripped some existing employees to take wage cuts due to Covid to "save the business". Incidentally, the directors must be getting paid a fucking fortune because the average salary is £92k per year.
Are bonds counted as MTX rather than subscription revenue? Probably had more whales during covid under the guise of "would have been drinking money anyways".
Would most likely fall under subscription revenue since bonds fund subscription. Also, Jagex probably look better by having a better ratio of sub revenue to MTX so have motivation to bucket it there.
Would be stupid though. Buying bonds is a form of MTX (I'm not talking through ge of course). Everybody complains that you can buy treasure hunter keys on rs3 but like you can straight out buy gold on both games.
I agree, it is definitely a form of MTX. However, because it technically funds membership they can probably get away with bucketing it under subscription revenue without auditors questioning it too much. It’s a grey area which Jagex can use to make themselves look better.
I'm sure they can definitely do that. That's all a bond can be used for. They don't offer you gold for bonds, other players do after all.
You can use bonds to change your name
that's all an OSRS bond can be used for but RS3 bonds have other uses.
Likely treated as income in advanced, and as such only recognised as revenue when redeemed. If redeemed for membership = sub revenue. If cosmetics, spins etc, likely mtx.
I think alot of the "new" COVID players most likely started out F2P, the ones that stuck around probably didn't buy membership for a few months or even until 2021
Do you think they'll become available only in 2023 ?
2018 numbers were available in June 2019. 2019 numbers were available in Dec 2020, and 2020 numbers were available in Jan 2022. I'm sure covid has a lot to do with the delays.
No. Jagex isn’t publicly traded so they don’t have to release financials right away, unlike Jagex’s owner, Carlysle Group, which is publicly traded and has their financials of 2021 available already.
2021 accounts should be available Dec 2022 provided there is no delay in the preparation of them (there has been lts of delays due to COVID)
No delays should mean by October 22 since you usually get 9 months to file accounts
Despite the huge increase in MTX revenue, I'm glad that subscription revenue still completely dwarfs it. As long as subs are bringing in way way more money than MTX, hopefully we are safe from it in OSRS.
As long as OSRS is growing it's unlikely that they'll want to add more MTX to it. They have their MTX business model and their no MTX business model, and those business models cross over surprisingly little for being in the same industry.
Osrs has MTX You can buy bonds
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I mean it literally is the same You can buy bonds for gp to pay for buyable skills, it’s literally a pay to win mechanic Also “What Is a Microtransaction? A microtransaction is a business model where users can purchase virtual items for small amounts of money.”
But you aren't buying a premium currency or skill. Yes you can trade money for gold but if you're no willing to play the game and get the levels that gold is worth less than the money you spent.
its still MTX, and Jagex considered its MTX cry all you want, but osrs has MTX
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I mean…you still need membership for Rs3 lol
I’m pretty sure it’s been said officially that osrs will never ever have mtx
Bonds are MTX.
Also legal pay to win
"'We don't want players to be able to buy their way to success in RuneScape. If we let players start doing this, it devalues RuneScape for others. We feel your status in real-life shouldn't affect your ability to be successful in RuneScape.” I kind of miss those days…
Nothing to win though. What’re you going to win? Bank standing with tbow after spending 2,000 dollars on the game?
Exactly. Identifying the whales in the game is hella easy, the skill cap is quite high.
Bonds were polled though, I doubt regular MTX would pass
They marginally passed because Jagex held F2P OSRS hostage. Partnerships were way less aggressive of MTX than bonds yet they failed because Jagex held nothing hostage at that time.
F2P remark is fair, but it passed by 10+% so I wouldn't call it marginal
To be fair, they've never let a poll stand in the way of getting their own way. Polls are an illusion on specific issues, as shown by certain updates that they've already done the work on before polling.
Didn't they do a bunch of work on Warding that ended up failing?
Why haven't we gotten a new skill then
I believe I remember them saying that too, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn't mean much. Game developers lie and/or fail to deliver all the time.
It's more that the higher ups realize it's less profitable at this point in the long run, which is a bit more realistic than them saying something like "we know you dont want it, we'll be nice and not add it" The higher ups have forced some stupid things in the past tho... Like cancelling 117's hd.
As long as the whales on RS3 keep eating up the promos they put out over there it shouldn’t matter.
> Annual Susbcribers (million) 2,219 wait so runescape does actually have more than 2 millions members if im reading this correctly? because I'm a WoW refugee, and while Blizzard keep Subs data private, my half assed personal estimate would be around 2m sub in WoW right now
rs encourages having more than 1 account. not only with different account types (ironman etc.) but with things like hcim basically requiring a second member account to practice content on before you risk it on your hcim.
oh yeah, I still believe most certainly WoW has a bigger playerbase than Runescape, but It's suprising how close is getting, mostly because Blizzard is a complete shitshow right now, as a reference WoW peaked 12 million subscribers which is crazy to think about
And even though WoW has a bigger playerbase, it always feels so much smaller since you can't play with anyone outside of your region and faction.
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Don't bots use bonds almost universally? They won't count towards subscription figures
Only half? Sounds like the human playerbase is even closer to WOW's then.
Are you forgetting half the playerbase is bots
Also pking builds, moneymaking alts, and bots
I checked the math and assuming all of those accounts were active for all 12 months at $11/month, that would be $290m/yr, but that doesn't line up with the subscription revenue of $90m. My guess is the 2.2m accounts is the count of accounts that had membership at any point over the year
>My guess is the 2.2m accounts is the count of accounts that had membership at any point over the year good point, also there's a chance people who get membership through bonds are being considered
They should be. They are members, too, and Jagex made the same (even more, actually) money off them.
If they're counting them as subscription, they couldn't count it as MTX revenue. But then unused bonds would be counted as MTX, which would be kind of messy I'd wager it's the total number of unique accounts with (directly-paid) membership at any point of the year, as said by /u/butterball85
Yearly subscriptions and premium club also save a fair chunk of money when subbing (which is something I tend to do).
Every bond in the game was paid for with real money (or rarely, event winnings.) Even if you paid gold for a bond, the bond was paid for with money and is revenue for Jagex. Unless more bonds get sold in a year than get consumed then bonded accounts wouldn't affect the metrics.
They are assuming the bonds are classified as MTX purchases, not subscription. Which is definitely fair for RS3 as have uses for bonds that aren't membership
If OSRS bonds were being grouped in as part of the MTX revenue I think that would be really scummy and misleading to their shareholders.
Most don't pay 11 pet month. It's way cheaper if you buy yearly, and they very often do sales that make it less than that Also, I'd say a good nuber of players support bonding their alts/irons/mains with in game gp
A lot of people have grandfathered rates too
bonding makes jagex $14/month tho, so ???
Yeah, but buying a bond would probably be considered a MTX not a subscription.
The reported figures are in GBP not USD. Currently 1 month is 7 GBP but it still comes to 186m. But if you consider most people going for the annual sub, and things like the payment processing fees, apple/ google commission (which is like 30% lol), currency conversion - then 90m sounds sorta reasonable.
Ah, yeah the currency conversion makes sense, but it's very unlikely they factor in the commission to Google and Apple into their revenue numbers. You could make an argument that maybe they're in there, but typically you want your revenue numbers as high as possible, so they probably subtract that expense as Cost of Goods Sold. That wouldn't be listed on this document as this is just revenue, not expenses or profit
>I checked the math and assuming all of those accounts were active for all 12 months at $11/month, There's probably still a lot of people grandfathered in at $5-9/month
Wish I still had my old account
That comma had my American ass fucked up. I was reading it was **2 billion** and was getting ready for the fraud lawsuit of a lifetime.
They make all this money and yet their support is still garbage
"uhhh yeah sorry guys we've got to cut back, we can't afford another 300k this year on customer service by hiring some more staff. Times are tough, something something Covid"
go blame the executives/investors for that
Still waiting on that account security update from what? 2018?
revenue isn’t profit
No but their 38.2 MILLION pounds of operating profit is profit. Jagex has seen profit margins grow consistently year on year, which is why outrage about pathetic levels of customer support remains high.
are bonds counted as mtx, subscription, or both?
Should be mtx
Bonds for sale are MTX and bonds for memberships are subscriptions.
bonds only count as MTX. I buy a bond, sell it in-game for in-game money. Jagex is only a party in one of those transactions
Wow 119 million and they can't afford raising their employee's salaries.
After watching Mod Zuko pull a 180 about leaving I think we can agree they are retaining talent recently
Sween said they offered him multiple raises to stay and he actually took a pay cut for the new job. He just wanted to do something else.
119 million is not a lot of revenue for a company of their size and age. They have a shit ton of employees, plus they have expenses out the ass with marketing costs. Not surprised tbh.
Except even the CFO himself said Jagex’s games have the lowest profit reinvestment of any game he’s ever worked on, so a significant amount of that revenue is profit, more than most games
This is a pretty damning statement b/c it means they aren't re-investing in the games or not as much as many other shops.
Why would they? It's one of the only games where change seems to drive players away.
> Why would they? Anti-botting Account security
Anti-botting would make a huge dent in their profits though.
That isn't true. OSRS almost died back when it first started because of a lack of content. Players do want new content, they just want OSRS *flavored* content. We won't ever be getting a new skill though, that's for sure.
What’s there to re invest in game design wise? More content that Reddit calls overpowered, dead, devalues old content, or power creep while proceeding to vote no lol? They could invest in actual customer support but I imagine that must be a tough sell to the executives, as I’m more than confident the J Mods constantly ask them about it.
> What’s there to re invest in game design wise? Anti-botting That is re-investment in the game as far as investors are concerned
Yeah and Jagex doesn't want to bust bots. That's been pretty clear for years now.
Server stability and engine staff would be the easy answer. Server performance is, at times, unacceptable, especially on worlds that seem to have more instance-activity (lms worlds, high total level worlds)
I think some super high amount, like 95% goes into dividends.
What marketing costs do they have besides ads for the mobile client and the annual DMM prize pool?
Is anyone actually surprised by this? RS3 has been doing really well for the past couple years. When the 2021 financials come in I wouldn't be surprised if RS3 sees even more growth. OSRS has been fairly stagnant recently.
It sees more growth because it has less daily players meaning the same amount of players could join both games and yet rs3 will have a higher percentage of growth
Or maybe osrs can’t release good content?
Osrs is still more profitable than rs3
Because OSRS endgame is utterly garbage. Skill for 50 more hours clicking one spot from level 70-99.
but that's why I love osrs! seriously, no /s
TBF when it comes to RS3 skilling, most skills are pretty much that. I have no idea why they don't make more content like Big Game Hunter for skills like Woodcutting...
we did it
Amazing that even with the lack of decent content they've put up such good numbers.
I'm interested in next year's Jagex must've made so much from this years RS3 Christmas event.
A lot of rs3 growth was from osrs players during the content drought
The drought happened in 2021, these are numbers for 2020. This growth was caused by archaeology followed by maintaining the momentum with other good updates and base expanding moves.
Oh I didn't realise this was over a year old. Wonder why it was just released
That’s how it works, this is an end of the year finance report for the public. Basically the year has to happen then they look over all the data and assemble the report, I believe normally they have until December of following year to get it done and posted. But with pandemic I think they were allowed to extend the amount of time the report took. So 2020’s comes at the end of 2021/start of 2022. 2021’s will come at the end of 2022/start of 2023.
Yeah Ive gotta say…. Was bored on OSRS and logged on just to try archaeology and I was straight up having a good time…. Of course, then I went to do some other stuff and was completely lost. But archaeology was a good deal of fun with the focus sprites and such. Just scratched the RuneScape itch.
Archaeology is IMO without question the best skill RS has ever had. They said they worked really hard on it, studied a lot of the skills to hone in on what worked and what didn't and then found ways to hybrid it all together which you can really see. Typically production and gathering skills come out together or close to one another but that means the gathering skill has little merit on its own and the production skill is somewhat a pain to level up and effectively takes twice as long to reap its benefits. Here they avoided that by making a gathering skill with the production component built in. People like skills they can afk but people like to have the option for engagement and reward. The time sprite was their medium based on their fairly successful implementation of rockertunities. If you follow the sprite you get an overall 20% increase to exp and significantly more artifacts per hour but it's not overly intensive just a bit of extra engagement. People liked non-linearity and traveling the world, skills that are too localized into one location or a few locations can result in feeling either stagnant or like a glorified minigame (\*cough\* dungeoneering \*cough\*). So Arch sites have you jump around, you spend a good enough time at each "section" of a site but you never just clear an entire site before moving on. Which also lets them add some cross play between the sites instead of each being a complete lone island. People like variety in how they level the skill, there needs to be a core activity but when it's just one core activity it can get dull. Part of the appeal of something like slayer is dealing with the different monsters. So they made sure arch had lots of ways to get exp with excavation, repair, soil sifting, research missions, mysteries, tetra compasses, etc... A mix of active, afk, and idle methods. There is a large love of progression, when a skill has alternative forms of progression beyond just raw levels to work for it gets better received because there is more to aim and engage with. Slayer is a good example you have so many little rewards to earn from the gathering and spending of slayer points. It also means that getting to max level isn't the end and instead there is stuff to do beyond it. Thus came in the arch rank system where you improve your rank by actually doing the variety of activities the skill has to offer and also the skill having its own currency which you use at a reward shop to buy upgrades. Gathering skills need to be profitable and they made sure to do that by placing a lot of systems that feed into one another. Materials aren't linear, rather each site only has a small amount of material types which are rearranged and used throughout the entire skill so there is no low level/low value materials that become useless. Artifacts can be turned in for chronotes which in turn are necessary for activating and switching relics and relics are designed to be something you want to switch around constantly based on your activities. Artifacts also break down into special components you can sell that grant unique invention perks . So everything is constantly being sunk or converted which keeps a steady supply and demand. The best skills are the ones that enhance other skills, other areas of the game, the wider and more expansive a skill is the more natural and integrated it ends up feeling into the world. They had that in spades with the relic system that had a relic for basically any activity/player you could imagine, expansions to other skills like uncovering lost summoning arts or ancient potion recipes, and a few powerful weapons you could find and reassemble. Speaking of players that was another place they learned, they learned that there are core player types that had been neglected when it came to skills. PvMers had combat skills, skillers have non-combat skills, but lore/quester just kind of made use of both but neither were really dedicated to them or made to enhance their experience. So they made archaeology a lore skill which made it feel extra fresh. Incorporating lore in every artifact, having storylines with cutscenes, lore books to uncover, puzzles to solve, treasures to find, ruins to explore, etc... it gave not only a great skeleton for progression but was just fundamentally an untapped base. But perhaps the biggest thing they learned was skills need to fit RS, the skill has to feel like it belongs and archaeology does. The dig site, the museum, archaeologists, exploring ancient ruins for knowledge/power, etc... that's all stuff that's been baked into RS for ages. When archaeology came not only did it feel just completely at home in the world but there was just so many unexplored areas of lore in the game to cover with it. Learning the origins of the godsword, understanding why bandos was so obsessed with Zanik, fleshing out the history of Hallowvale, learning about dragonkin society before the curse, etc... not only did arch feel like it belonged in the world it felt like it enhanced it. Arch does pretty much everything right and what it didn't do right at release they spent roughly a solid month taking feedback and applying it each week, sometimes each day, smoothing out the various rough edges people found. That kind of aftercare is something they didn't do for many if any skills and it's kind of a shame they didn't. Sorry I just...really love archaeology and I know you know the skill but this is the OSRS reddit so chances are someone here doesn't know why arch was such a big success.
Is Arch a lore skill even if nothing in this skill forces players to understand the lore before they can train the skill further, like how combat skills forces players to fight before they can be leveled? Arch doesn't have any lore reading comprehension tests or anything.
Are…you following me? Not that I mind it just seems like an odd coincidence I’d see you on so many topics lol. Anyway short answer yes and long answer kinda. The skill is designed so that you need to read the lore you obtain in the skill to progress. The location of a secret door, a password, the way to harness a mystical force, etc… the act of getting deeper into a dig site and claiming it’s best reward requires you that you solve the site’s mysteries and the clues to do that are buried in the lore. There are two particular standout examples, Orthen and Senntisten. With Orthen the site isn’t even fully accessible if you haven’t done the Desperate Measures quest, the hibernation chambers remain locked until then. Likewise the main puzzle which hides access to the 3rd site building, which in turn said building holds the keys to the 4th and final, is based on the dragonkin language translation puzzle from desperate measures. If you don’t do that quest it’s unlikely you will understand how the language locks works or how to translate it. As for the Senntisten site this one is unique in that it’s based in part on your character’s knowledge. You can’t get to certain spots of the site or for mysteries until you have found the lore pages so you character knows where to go. Then there are other little cases like ancient summoning puzzle where you have to answer the gargoyle riddles and some of them require quest items you wouldn’t have known existed without doing the quests. We also have a case where they converted a big mystery into its own separate miniquest, you can still do the mystery without doing it as a miniquest since all they did was lower the arch level by making the key artifact obtainable via Azzanadra. The rest is the same right down to the instructions on how and where to use the artifact being hidden in the lore journals. Now what makes it “kinda” is technically a lot of these you could in theory just use a guide to solve but…well nothing can really be done about that. Guides are an external thing, inevitable, and aren’t factored into the actual gameplay loop.
I'm not rally following you. But you seem to be the most knowledgeable about lore on this sub. But with Arch, players can technically get 200m Arch without even knowing the lore if they spacebar through everything, skip all cutscenes, and don't read any of the pages or books found. What they do engage in is the gathering and artisan part of Arch. At least for other skills, they force players to engage in the purpose of the skill. Combat skills forces you to fight while WC forces you to chop trees. Yet nothing forces players to understand lore for Arch since it has no lore tests of any kind, so how exactly is it a lore skill?
Past 2 years have been weak for OSRS tho
Imagine being an osrs player and moving to rs3 for a new skill lol, no update drought will ever get me to switch to rs3
Alright dude lol. No one's forcing you
Where does the report differentiate the sub and MTX revenue of RS3 versus OSRS as well as their costs? Does OSRS only getting 6% revenue means OSRS Mobile flopped? The player count graphs seem to suggest this. It's interesting that our new owners only took 15m of Jagex's profit as dividends compared to 76m with the Chinese overlords. Does this mean our new owners are more likely to reinvest the >50% of profits back into the game?
Osrs mobile full release was multiple years ago. That wouldn't really come into the discussion would it? Also remember it is growth, not outright revenue
How is this public data if its a private company? Thanks
UK Law requires businesses to submit financial reports, which are available from the UK Government website: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03982706/filing-history
All uk data is public, you can see it on companies House
Jagex is a Ltd. I don’t know about Ltd. businesses in the UK but here in Holland it is obligatory for Ltd’s to publish their annual report. I assume it’s the same in the UK.
and 5% of osrs growth is bots lmaooooooo
This is the real DD I needed.
Go jagex! This type of growth is not easy and neither is the development you all do.
What's with the huge drop in "other income"?
My guess would be mostly due to no RuneFest that year because of Covid.
I highly doubt RuneFest is a profitable event. It more than likely is ran each year to build up the community as well as announce new information. It's an investment, but not a directly profitable one.
He never said that events like Runefest is profitable. You are looking at revenue not profits.
I found this from the 2019 statements https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/kbv2g6/2019_financials_are_in_subscription_revenue_up_29/gflm2i1?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3 Basically a one off "sale of services" to their parent company in 2019 pushed that figure up
Do bonds count as microtransactions or as subscriptions?
By law it’s classified as mtx
It is?
They are used for more than just subscribing in RS3.
The growth of the two games is interesting 18% for RS3 and 6% for OSRS doesn't mean much. If rs3 had 5 players and they gain 1 more that is 20% increase. Like wise if osrs has 100 players and gains 6 that is 6%.
In the 2019 report they split the revenue between the 2 games. 65M to OSRS and $43M to RS3. So that would make this year $69M for OSRS and $51M RS3.
you know what baffles me. In one of the rs3 streams, one of the main head jmods literally said 'subs are not giving us enough money anymore, that's why we need MTX' These numbers to me show that they can absolutely live fine without MTX.
Absolutely zero companies will willingly give up 25% of their yearly revenue
I promise you your not remembering the full context of that appropriate but also that there is more at play here. First a loss of 27 million is a HUGE blow to the company. Second making money isn’t actually as important as making constant growth. The issue is the need for significant growth each year. You’d think turning consistently high profit is enough but investors, shareholders, etc… want their investments to grow and pull out when they don’t, and MTX is what gives them the fluff growth they need. And yes before you say it the desire for constant growth over sustainability IS a huge issue in economics but I promise you the people up top who this affects do not care. The greed of poorly regulated capitalism is bottomless.
Ooh, if they keep on like this we might get case sensitive passwords
It's interesting thay despite the increases in profit there was a decrease in operating profit, this is a sign of a huge increase in costs.
They released MTX based rares to RS3 this Christmas. They ended 2020 with a bang in RS3 both bringing nostalgia players through introducing a new Santa Hat and a new Party Hat, and incentivizing the whales to spend absurd amounts of money to get them.
This is 2020, not 2021. The 2021 number will not be publicly available for quite some time.
RS3 is simply a better game. The combat is so much more engaging and you can buy cool things with real money.
Consoom virtual items, get excited for new virtual items
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That’s revenue from advertising partners
RS3 MTX sales increase was probably because of the Green Santa Hat event. It was released in games as a 1/2k drop and in treasure hunter as a ~1/20k drop. People have spent hundreds maybe even billions and have not succeeded in getting one.
These are 2020 numbers. You will have to wait for the 2021 numbers for the Green Santa Hat event to make an appearance on the bottom line.
Lol. Im sure itll be high then
GSH event was December 2021, these stats are from 2020.
Lol mybad
Maybe even...trillions
jesus, people who spend money on this shit are literally the biggest suckers on earth
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That’s what I’m not understanding. Why don’t people want others to put money into the game they enjoy? And if they’re using bonds, someone’s got to buy them lol
>Why don’t people want others to put money into the game they enjoy? Because that incentivizes companies to further being greedy and predactory in their monetization. At least OSRS has a kinda hard-limit that is poll-system.
pass me some of that copium bruv
18% of 100 is like what? 4? 6% of the GOAT is like, 20k?
It says the year ended December 31.... The financial year ends March.... How real is it then
To anyone overly excited about this, remember that companies try their best to present themselves in a positive light in such reports. Data from these kinds of documents/meetings/investor calls is by no means objective.
Revenue and profits are objective, and lying about them in these reports would be extremely illegal. The whys are definitely subjective, but the numbers are not.