Stating no lies, RuneScape CEO says the MMO's players "used to be angsty 16-year-olds listening to Breaking Benjamin. Now it's 33-year-old accountants and CEOs who've got 41 minutes in an evening"

RuneScape, collectively, is officially 25 years old. In many ways, nothing has changed for the evergreen sandbox MMO. The most popular branch, Old School RuneScape, is very deliberately sticking to the principles of the 2007 version of the game while adding in an impressive amount of new content, including the first new skill in over a decade.

Yet linear time marches on. Much like the average gamer, RuneScape's audience has gotten older. So much older, in fact, that CEO Jon Bellamy of developer Jagex reckons (in an interview with Knowledge), "If you think about who the customers were and who RuneScape had to serve 20 years ago, it used to be angsty 16-year-olds listening to Breaking Benjamin. Now it's 33-year-old accountants and CEOs who've got 41 minutes in an evening."

This is historical fact, of course. One of the most-viewed tomes in the glorious library of RuneScape music videos (RSMVs) is for Breaking Benjamins' "Blow Me Away," still viewable on YouTube today as proof that time travel is very real, it's just a product of congealed nostalgia punching you between the eyes rather than any theoretical physics jabber. In fairness, however, when I used to sprint to the family computer to load up RuneScape after getting home from school, I'd also blast Linkin Park, Anberlin, Evanescence (another RSMV staple), Billy Talent, and various shades of butt rock. This is perhaps not helping my case.

I'm neither an accountant nor a CEO, but as a 32-year-old man who writes about video games all day on his own computer while still occasionally listening to Billy Talent and Evanescence, I don't think I could beat Bellamy's argument even if it had its hands tied and I had a steel bat.

There is some real game-facing substance to Bellamy's argument. OSRS, especially, is built in a way that, even if you'd obviously progress faster with more time investment, your progress stays meaningful no matter how much you can play each day after you drag yourself home from a long shift of accounting or whatever it is CEOs do. If all you can manage is 41 minutes of Farming and Slayer, that's still experience and resources in the bank.

More seriously, Bellamy considers the growth of the RuneScape IP: "The fact that this franchise has managed to weather that transition, and has just had one of its highest growth years ever, is kind of insane as a player. As a business leader, it's only marginally less insane."

2025 was a banner year for Old School RuneScape in particular, setting multiple all-time player records. Bellamy says spinoff survival RuneScape: Dragonwilds also sold "four or five times what we thought was going to happen," and notes that mainline RuneScape (often dubbed RuneScape 3) meaningfully beat back its microtransaction infestation. OSRS is king, but the whole RuneScape royal family is in arguably the best shape it's ever seen.

Under Bellamy's leadership, Jagex has vowed to stick to what it does best. As the CEO put it last year: "The French make wine and the Germans make cars and Jagex makes RuneScape."

You can use "a tenth" of the AAA "$400 million budget" and still get "not so different results" if you do it right, RuneScape CEO says: "We've seen that from Clair Obscur and a bunch of others."