Over that time one thing has remained constant: the ongoing success of RuneScape rsgp. Mansell plans to continue this, but the future of Jagex will diversify with a new focus on being the home of ‘living game’. This new direction for the company came from extensive market research and analysis after the studio was bought by a Chinese company.

“I was made CEO at the beginning of 2017. ” Mansell explains. “It was a great point for all of us, not just our Chinese purchasers, but everyone at the studio to really assess what we wanted to do as a company. Because our new owners were saying ‘This is great, but where are you guys going next?’. Which is an awesome situation to be in. So we did a good amount of introspection, but we also looked out at the market as well. What do we think we’re good at? What do we want to do in the future, and how does that map to trends in the runescape buy gold market?

“What came out of that was insight about ourselves as well as what the market was doing. To really distillate them down. The market insights told us that it costs more to make game with every year that passes. Even the quality of indie titles now is crazy, let alone where you see triple-A game going. It’s incredibly expensive to stay competitive. What that means is. If you’re going to survive and be competitive, you need to capture as much value and revenue from your users as possible.

“Over the last five years traditional game publishers have more and more moved to live game. Obviously people like us have been getting it a long time, but now you see, for example, FIFA Ultimate Team. FIFA, one of the most stalwart, traditional game, being almost completely rebooted with a free to play, collection, gatcha, panini sticker model. Post-Clash of the Clans, everything is social. All of these things are consistent.”

BEYOND LIVE GAMES

This shift in the industry is becoming practically ubiquitous. To the extent that there is an outcry lamenting the ‘death of single player game’. Things are perhaps not that drastic yet, with the likes of Mario Odyssey, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn selling very well in 2017, but there’s a large, hungry percentage of gamers who are desperate for more League of Legends, PUBG and Rainbow Six: Siege.

“The other thing we realised was that players are in this trip as well. We all believe that it anecdotally, but there’s a lot of analyst research that backs it up. Players are putting more time and more, money into fewer and fewer games. I feel it as well and we see it from our players, you want the game to bring you something back. You want the game to recognise your time investment, you want it to help you make friends, to give you lots of cool things to be in.

“On the player side, you’ve got that demand. I think that’s why you’re seeing the rise of live game. Over the last two or three years, everyone’s was talking about it. However, certainly over the last five years the foundations were laid. EA has it as its main strategy. Ubisoft has it as its main strategy. More core gaming parts of Activision have it. And then if you look over at China with Tencent and others, that is their business.

“For us that was really interesting, there’s this wave that is progressively moving forward. We’ve been in that race and we’ve been innovating in our own way here and there, we’re one of the first UK devs to build a proper broadcast studio in our office. We do live streaming, we sponsor esportsy kind of events, we try to do competitive gaming with MMORPGs, which is a bit weird, but we’ve figured out a massively accelerated way for 2,000 people to compete for a grand prize. We’ve figured out a way to do that.”

With all this market research, Jagex started trying to figure out ways to position itself less as just another company investing in the live game trend, but instead leapfrogging into the evolved version of the phenomenon. Its the solution? Living game.

“There’s live game, but if you can push it, then you’re into ‘living game. ” explains Mansell. “That’s the next level. That’s the way we’re describing it and that’s aspirationally what we want Jagex to be done. The home of ‘living game’. So if you are a player – and there are a lot of players who want this kind of experience – you know

You can come to see what Jagex has to offer.

“We’ve not got there yet. We’ve got quite a lot to be done. A very small number of other companies are pushing on that wavefront as well, but there’s no one else who is specialising in it, I Don’t think, and we think that’s where we can really focus. Building the skills ourselves.”

FIVE PILLARS

According to Jagex, There are five key pillars for creating living game experience and they are all areas where the studio has been building its expertise since the launch of RuneScape. But areas that need to be taken to the next level.

“So that was in our head. ” Mansell says. “why should we not only adapt, but jump the queue? How do we get to the front of that wave of live game that’s going ahead? And that grew into our aspiration for living game. The idea that if you look at what people would call a live game at the moment... For some people, that’s how they market it, maybe being more digital first, using influences, and so on. For devs, maybe it’s having updates to the game. Having social features. There’s a wavefront of what is accepted as a live game. We said ‘This is our thing, we want to really lead the market on it’. So why should you push each of those to the next level? That’s become our credence.

“We have five pillars of that. The first is designing a game to be evergreen. It’s a changed mindset if you’re a game designer. Really just thinking about a game that is fundamentally inexhaustible. You have content and you have systems that can be there indefinitely, but still have depth and satisfaction for players.”

“Then there’s having really meaningful social features. Not just asynchronous trading of items, but talking with people, making friends, having rivalries. The emotional connection that keeps you coming back. Because you want to speak to these people, they’re part of your social circle. It’s been around for a while in MMORPGs, but it’s starting to proliferate out. There’s more design considering around making that work.