World of Warcraft is the 800-pound gorilla of the MMO world – the undisputed titan that the entire genre is measured against. You might think that the developers behind RuneScape, an even older and far more modest online RPG, would've been a little nervous when Blizzard's game launched, but it seems that's not the case. Jagex was, after all, too busy suffering from success.
There was "surprisingly not" much worry about WoW's launch within Jagex, according to an interview with RuneScape design director Mark Ogilvie from the October 2014 issue of GamesTM. Ogilvie attributed the RuneScape's success to its very light design, which meant that the devs could implement new content at an extremely fast pace, and to the fact that it could run on just about any computer of the era. Those weren't areas where Blizzard was able to compete.
"Update frequency and accessibility were still our trump cards and actually our audience weren't that interested in WoW," Ogilvie said. "I think it did affect the rate of new customers, but frankly we were struggling to hire staff and build new servers fast enough to deal with the rate we did have, which was still tens of thousands of new accounts every single day."
Neither WoW nor RuneScape have lost much momentum in the past 20 years, as they're both still wildly popular, and counted among the best MMORPGs out there. Neither game has been without controversy in the intervening years – you can look at WoW's story criticisms and critiques of RuneScape's monetization for current examples – but that's some impressive staying power for a pair of MMOs that came to life when the very idea of playing online with other people was still pretty novel.
