A sizable chunk of World of Warcraft streamers and players have jumped to Old School RuneScape for some MMO R&R this summer, and developer Jagex has enjoyed the migration more than anyone, smiling at the rising player count and studying the experience of new users.
Kieren Charles, design director Mod Kieren on the OSRS team, discussed the 2025 migration in an interview with GamesRadar+. He affirms that there has indeed been a "huge influx" of new accounts these past few months, which brings its own challenges. "It's a good panic, right?" he says. "Of all the problems to have in the world, too many players is one of the best. And so we have been getting servers up essentially as fast as we can to help handle it."
Charles says the summer trend really caught the team's eye a bit over a month ago "when we saw some of the new streamers playing the game and experiencing it."
"There is something you get from watching streamers, or YouTubers, for that matter, that is just unique. It's the shared community experience of watching someone discover this stuff. As developers, it's immensely valuable. You don't normally get the benefit of actually sitting there watching someone's entire game experience for literally hundreds of hours. So we've learned an awful lot from that as well, for what it's worth.
"It's when the streamers started jumping on it, and then you see our community jumping on it, and seeing the appreciation of our community on this has also been amazing. They're desperate for people to understand why they love this game so much. So they get something so big out of watching other people then discover what they've discovered years ago.
"And I think that's where it registered. It was a slow trickle, right? You had some streamers jumping over, and then it started to escalate when more and more streamers jumped over, and some of the big names like Sodapoppin coming over and playing. It felt like a real point where, oh my God, there is a big buzz going on right now, and we're getting to watch this happen and unfold, and our community is fully embracing it."
For the new player experience, Charles takes aim at a lot of early quests where the in-game journal tips aren't "as helpful" as newer quests tend to be. "These things can very much send people down the wrong path, especially when they're trying to do it without guides," he says.
Jagex is also looking at run energy – a hangup is compounded in the early game when you don't know where you're going, end up burning more energy finding your way, and spend a lot of time walking slowly around.
Boosted by the WoW player data, he says "we've started to bring together a bit of a list of learnings from our own knowledge, experience, from our own data, but also from seeing these people discover the game, and there's definitely going to be changes we want to make, small tweaks. There's a lot of low hanging fruit where these are some easy changes that will just make a difference."
This WoW influx helped drive OSRS to a new concurrent player record that beat a previous high set during a limited-time event which "always drives a lot of temporary elevated traffic." This new peak came on a normal weekend, and while it is an outlier, Charles reckons it's not entirely unexpected.
"We've been seeing this for 12 years now," he says. "Old School has been on an upwards trajectory pretty much its entire history. To me, it's a new phase. It feels a bit different. It feels like there's so much more attention on it, and obviously the game's just getting bigger and bigger, but we've been seeing these numbers generally creep up for 12 years straight, and I think that's pretty unique. There's not a ton of games, certainly in the MMO space, that are consistently growing like that, and there's no feedback like that to tell us we're doing something right with this game and to stick to those same principles, because it's working.
"And there's a lot of luck involved, right? Seeing a lot of these people jump over and play the game for the first time. Inherently, we didn't necessarily have direct control over that. It's amazing to see it happen. But I believe you earn your own luck in this world, and certainly in games development, I see it as everything we've done over the last 10-plus years as what's given us the opportunity to succeed like this."
