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Jagex on War of Legends
Part one of our exclusive chat with Jagex's CEO Mark Gerhard about RuneScape, what's next, and the press.
Written by Andy Griffiths, 19 January 2010
GamerZines: War of Legends is a bit of a change of pace for Jagex...
Mark Gerhard: Yeah it's a big thing for us - a landmark occasion- as it is the first of many third party published titles. In a publishing role we have spent a lot of time with War of Legends basically helping it become more accessible and optimising it for a western audience, rather than just shipping it and seeing how many units it sells. Almost non-commercial if you will, it's very much about publishing with these guys. We also have an agreement to publish it for life, which is pretty unique in the publishing space.
To date we have just done our own stuff like RuneScape, but there's an incredibly large community behind Jagex. We currently have over 164.8 million registered accounts of which 112 million are active and unique. We've been out there for nearly a decade now and we've always been known as the quirky developer in Cambridge, at the same time there's a real warmth and appreciation of who we are. We are very much the gamers' gamer, we create games we would want to play and as a result of that comes success rather than starting with the question, "How do we make money?"
With War of Legends the guys (developers) said "This game has made it in China, why don't you play it and tell us what you think." We played it, we liked it and they asked if we could publish it exclusively for the western market and we said "Sure, we'll get behind it."
We've really collaborated with them during the last few months so that it will have the best chance to appeal to gamers of our generation, it's definitely for older gamers. We're going into beta on the 19th January (today) and we're expecting to launch in February. There are a ton of things going on at the moment, this is one of them and it's a division we're looking to expand quickly and provide great content to the community.
PCGZine Issue 38
For our latest War of Legends coverage, click here to download PCGZine Issue 38 for free.GZ: There's a lot of parallels between what you're doing and what Bethesda did last year. Is it now more about promoting Jagex as a brand?
MG: Before we were happy to be invisible, even as the number one free multiplayer game out there - winning Guiness World Records and things like that - but we've been discreet about it. Even as far as not taking business helicopters or buying Ferraris, it's just guys that are passionate about gaming. We would be more than happy if RuneScape was world famous, but by having the world's biggest free game in terms of active players and content, it has won us plenty of kudos with gamers.
We know our top 3 players have invested over 17,000 hours worth of game time, yet they've never payed for a day. That's cool, we're happy about that because we've built a game that is so big it can be enjoyed for that amount of time for free. It's an integrity which people know us for and it's more about the experience than how we monetise it.
GZ: Do you think it is a failing of the gaming press that you guys don't get more attention?
MG: Yes! (laughs) There's an entire cultural phenomenon that's going on at the moment with casual games and this whole online space which is really being ignored, despite the mind-boggling numbers. A lot of people are still focused on that cinematic, event driven game with a big marketing spend for retail. All the eyeballs move from one event to another, whereas there are guys like us who are just getting on with it and taking a growing piece of the gaming pie. Ten years ago we developed RuneScape and we couldn't get anyone to publish it. All the usual suspects who are still around today like EA and others didn't understand the online space because it was all about retail.
Now that has moved from PC to console and I think you need to look at everyone's stock price to get a real sense of where they are going. Even today I'd argue many don't understand the online space. The media attention and everything else isn't really there but certainly the players, in terms of where they spend their time and money, is moving there.
War of Legends coverage available in PCGZine Issue 38 - click here to download it for free!
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