Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Runescape Finance

Some quite interesting numbers about Jagex and Runescape. The source looks credible enough to me.

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5 comments:

Timothy Gold said...

Some very interesting figures right there.

Tt bothers me that Runescape is being depicted as the underdog of WoW though. They may be content with the game's current size, but the Gower brothers should seriously start advertising.

I'd kill for some RS merchandise. All we have now are some pathetic ringtones, a poster and a very basic strategy guide targetted at 10 year olds.

February 6, 2008 at 5:06 AM
Anonymous said...

Vaskor, a very interesting post, the times is a very well positioned news paper in the UK so the source is reliable, well as reliable as newspapers get.

Timothy, Jagex have registered their trademark for extra merchandise including t shirts and many more promotional materials for Runescape and Mechscape so it may be in the pipeline or they could just be stopping anyone else doing it.

I would like to feature the trademark information on my website but its covered by Crown copyright so I dare not reproduce it.

I could set up an international printing and distribution network for t shirts in a month or so if Jagex were interested, Andy, Paul give us a shout.

February 6, 2008 at 6:25 AM
Vaskor said...

Agree. There is definitely an unexploited market opportunity.

February 6, 2008 at 8:44 AM
Anonymous said...

These numbers are not good. If you do the math, their earnings per employee is under $ 82,000. By comparison, the earnings per employee for the company I work for (Adobe) is around $ 500,000 ( wish I saw more of that . . . .).
Jagex either has too many employees or too little revenue.

WoW has over 10 million players who play $15 / month (not counting the cost to start). WoW has 10 times the players at 3 times the price = 30 times the bucks. WoW brings in more money per year than most African nations do. Blizzard makes more games than just WoW and has 2300 employees (not counting the Vivendi group) -- this means Blizzards earnings per employee is closer to the $500,000 that investors like to see. Jagex is bloated, it simply has too many employees for the (small) amount of money it brings in.

Also there are some reasonably well-sourced rumors that the number of subscribers lost by Jagex recently is more than the 60,000 reported in the article, a lot more.

February 7, 2008 at 11:18 AM
Vaskor said...

Well, that explains why Jagex salaries for developers are that low. However, Jagex manages to be very profitable.

February 7, 2008 at 7:00 PM

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