RuneScape and Old School RuneScape developer Jagex is mired in a mess of its own making after canceling or downsizing regularly planned pride events for both MMOs, reportedly due to directives from new CEO John Bellamy, who was evidently worried that people perceiving Pride as "woke" content would stir up backlash.
Instead, backlash has now come thick and fast from the RuneScape player base. Other Jagex staff, many of whom opposed the Pride shrinkage internally, have joined in as well.
Sharing the original report from Pink News on Bluesky, former Jagex Mod John Ayliff said: "I worked on RuneScape 2005-2014. I haven't thought about it much since then, but it occasionally pops up in my feed and seeing it usually makes me happy and nostalgic. But this makes me really angry. Cowardly and disgusting."
In a separate post, Ayliff responded to the jokey comparisons that the Old School RuneScape community has drawn between Bellamy and an in-game character named Sigmund, a member of the game's human supremacist group that seeks to expunge or eradicate non-human races.
Ayliff actually wrote Sigmund as part of the OSRS Dorgeshuun questline, and says, "I could not have predicted when I created this quest villain that he would end up being used to mock a cowardly and/or bigoted CEO, but I wholeheartedly approve."
Ayliff added that "we couldn't get away with openly queer NPCs back then but I always imagined Zanik the cave goblin was bi, so I was delighted when the 2017 Tales of Pride made her canonically bi."
Now-deleted posts from a separate Jagex staff member supported claims that these Pride events were only canceled after a fair amount of work had gone into them, and that there was no data indicating Pride events had been damaging to player counts.
The backdrop to this is fairly widespread pushback among many RuneScape players, especially in the larger and historically vocal Old School RuneScape community. The main 2007scape Reddit community is one thing, but even the more niche Ironscape Reddit community, dedicated to one-man-army Ironman-type accounts, has a new pinned post that reads: "Homophobia is not welcome here."
"With the removal of in-game events to focus on content we want and to steer away from representative content, can we expect that our two Holiday Events that are also strongly representative of a belief of faith to be removed?" asks one OSRS post marked as humor.
This is one of many parodies making the rounds. "This is Old School RuneScape, not New Politics WokeScape," says the creator of a separate post showing a mock-up update that would remove indigenous people, pronouns, and women, and gift all players with a set of robes worn by the aforementioned human supremacist organization HAM (Humans Against Monsters).
A more serious assessment of the Pride event's implications is also rising up the community, pointing out, among other arguments, that RuneScape is filled with political topics and the "leave politics out of games" argument doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
We've reached out to Jagex for comment but have not yet received a response.
Jagex lays off RuneScape staff and indefinitely pauses Old School RuneScape's Project Zanaris private servers, but says the MMOs won't be hurt in the long run
