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RuneScape and Old School RuneScape owner Jagex has cut staff for the former MMO and all but canceled a big project for the latter, indefinitely pausing work on the Project Zanaris community servers that would've let players tweak, customize, or break the game to their liking.
Yesterday, the main RuneScape Reddit community noticed that social media accounts belonging to several Jagex staff members, or moderators, had disappeared. In a reply to this post, Jagex's Mod Hooli confirmed "there have unfortunately been job reductions at Jagex."
"These have been made as part of changes in a company restructure as Jagex puts more emphasis on RuneScape games and community growth," Hooli said. "The majority of roles are from non-game dev and non-player facing areas. There are some exceptions within the RS team as part [of] the company's focus on a streamlined development approach."
The scope of the layoffs is unclear. These layoffs have come just months after Jagex changed CEOs, appointing Jon "Mod North" Bellamy – an executive shake-up that came roughly one year after the company was acquired by private equity firm CVC Capital and games investor Haveli Investments. Private equity overseers making cuts to departments routinely seen as non-essential by corporate owners? Color me surprised.
Hooli says these staff cuts won't affect the RuneScape roadmap laid out by Mod North. "Our Roadmap won't change because of these job reductions, and we'll continue the great path we've been on with our content," their post reads.
The Old School RuneScape team, meanwhile, says "the incredible talent behind [Project Zanaris] have been redistributed across Jagex or directly moved to Old School to help with ongoing improvements and exciting new initiatives."
Granted, Jagex hasn't up and said community servers are dead, but they sure sound comatose. Officially, Zanaris has only been "paused" indefinitely because "it wouldn't have met expectations until much later in development." If or when work on Zanaris may resume is unclear, but Jagex says it would rather "prioritise the things that matter most to you today."
With no community servers, much of the work already completed for Zanaris will evidently go unused, but the project's "talent and technology" will benefit OSRS going forward. In its blog post, Jagex spells out a few key advancements it's making:
- "Faster, More Creative Events & Content Ideas: The Zanaris team had lots of new gameplay ideas and incredible concepts for events and features. Rather than shelving these, we'll explore how we can introduce some of these innovations through carefully curated temporary worlds. This means we can give you fresh experiences without impacting the OSRS core you love.
- Improved Server Infrastructure: We'll be using the cloud server technology developed for Zanaris to enhance our existing game worlds. This means greater reliability during peak periods.
- Wider Region Support: We're exploring options to bring an improved service to underserved regions outside our core world locations (UK, US, Germany, Australia)
- More Engaging Customisation: Zanaris brought us many customisation options that can now be introduced to main OSRS worlds or special event servers. These improvements will allow us to create more exciting time limited events and experimental content for you to enjoy.
- Strengthening the Roadmap: Members of the Zanaris team will be actively contributing to key initiatives on the OSRS roadmap, helping to enhance major content and support the game's long-term development"
"Although there was good work made on Zanaris, there's a lot that we're taking from the project that can benefit OSRS and more," Mod Sarnie says on Reddit.
Additionally, Jagex says the main idea behind Zanaris, letting players screw around with experimental content in their own little private garden, hasn't been forgotten.
"Rather than custom, player-hosted worlds, we're exploring the prospect of delivering more Community Events," the company says. These would be similar to the existing Deadman Mode and League events – respectively, a limited-time PvP mode and accelerated grind-a-thon – and "could even be a space where you can trial new content before it potentially makes its way into the main game," seemingly not unlike a Public Test Realm server.
As it fills the void left by Zanaris, Jagex has also asked players to submit ideas of their own, even opening a new feedback forum in the official OSRS Discord.
On Reddit, when not expressing disappointment over the custom modes and quests that Zanaris might have given them, or perhaps relief that Jagex is instead doubling down on the main game, players have suggested ideas ranging from one-life account modes to an offline version of OSRS.
Another OSRS staffer, Mod Ayiza, also discussed the Jagex layoffs in the context of the Zanaris decision. "Whilst it is unfortunate news, I'd like to make it clear that the reductions are completely unrelated and the decision to pause Zanaris was made prior to this," he said.
Asked if the OSRS team had been affected by the redundancies, Ayiza only said "it's not my place to comment but given we sign off on each news post you'll be able to confirm any changes yourself with the next update."
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