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Interview with Jagex CEO: Part Two
On today's agenda we talk about their ambition to challenge Blizzard, consoles, and MechScape.
Written by Andy Griffiths, 20 January 2010
GZ: Every MMO maker seems to want to make it onto consoles, but nobody can do it. What's the problem?
MG: The console manufacturers are the problem. Jagex is a Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo authorised developer, the reason why we don't have anything on the market is because all three are scared of the free-to-play model and that they are very protective over opening up their platforms. We've said to all three guys that we want to do it and we can do it, it's already working, but we need to have a global community. We're not going to segment off the 360 community from the PS3 or Wii etc. They've all said that they are fine to interact with a PC, but not another competing console and for us that's just not going to work.
Why would we want to do that? RuneScape is free, what better value than to give users a completely free game and then the inevitable issue of platform costs come up, "How about five Euros per month?" No you're shooting yourself in the foot because users can get it on a PC for free, do you want to move people away from your platform?
You can kind of see people going through the thought process and they understand how ridiculous it is. I suspect someone high up just said no. Until free MMOs appear on consoles, the respective platforms just aren't interesting to us. We are building a global community which is platform and language agnostic, there's no way we are breaking those rules for anyone.
If I'm looking into my crystal ball I would say five years from now that (MMO support on consoles) will change as a necessity, as their market share continues to decline. Someone, someday will smell the coffee and hopefully we'll be the catalyst for that.
We've done everything necessary to be there when they change their mind and we'll be the first to take advantage by offering consoles as an additional choice for our community. However having players pay for just being able to use their console for the service is just unimaginable, it's wrong.
GZ: Talking about the future, MechScape was canned at a great loss for Jagex. What lessons have been learnt from that?
MG: Rather than a lesson, it just reinforced our values that if something isn't good enough we aren't going to launch it. Our first focus and priority is our community and to bring quality games to them. It was great to have that reinforced, I was expecting the founders of Jagex to disagree, but they didn't and it was heartening to hear them get behind me and say it was the right thing to do. The game's okay, but we want a great game and we're going to go back and build a great game. When it's ready we'll bring it out.
We've effectively started again and I'm sure the team will bring us a great game, hopefully for a launch sometime this year.
GZ: Why have Jagex chosen now to promote themselves to the more traditional hardcore fans?
MG: Well, you say hardcore but if you saw some of the stats of our players you'd realise that our community is just as active as those guys playing Call of Duty or anything else. We have gamers interact with RuneScape and our other titles in a completely casual way, but also in a hardcore way and really that's down to the personality of the individual, and a variety which facilitates both play styles, it's an interesting dichotomy. We deserve the same amount of respect that is being afforded to World of Warcraft, we have player numbers and everything else to rival that anyway. So it's a game as big and as serious if not better, but interestingly enough the people who play that haven't tried RuneScape. We think that there's a missed opportunity there because we're fanatical about games and gamers, with a community which is exactly that.
