No more chasing competitors or following trends: Why RuneScape is going back to its British roots

When GamesIndustry.biz spoke to Jagex’s then-new CEO Jon Bellamy in 2025, he proudly said that there was nothing wrong with the games firm being known as “the RuneScape company”.

Well, that’s much more official in 2026. The firm’s branding is now Jagex: The RuneScape Company – and there are many more changes to come this year. Speaking at a briefing at Jagex’s Cambridge offices to media and content creators, Bellamy said that the firm was making a much bigger investment in all things RuneScape this year.

In fact, the chief executive said that he had gone to the board to beg for “multiple tens of millions of dollars” more than the company has ever spent before. This money is going into content creation, as well areas including player support, anti-cheat, and live events. The RuneFest convention is going to be bigger this year, and Jagex is holding its first North American event. This all comes as the RuneScape franchise passes £3 billion in lifetime revenue.

There’s a lot riding on Jagex’s 2026, but Bellamy told attendees at the company’s briefing that if it gets this year right, it’ll be “era-defining,” adding that “this will be our biggest and most ambitious and most challenging year on record.”

Part of the reason that Jagex is backing RuneScape to such a degree, according to the company’s SVP of product, James Dobrokski, is that there are a lot of fresh eyes on the MMO brand thanks to its “relatively new leadership team” and new owners, CVC Capital and Haveli.

“When you have a change like that, it forces you to ask whether you are doing the right thing,” Dobrowski tells GamesIndustry.biz.

“Is the strategy we have the correct one? Are we approaching our future in the way we want to approach it? We spent a lot of time early last year looking at what we were doing, asking ourselves if they’re the right things and making a lot of changes in terms of company strategy, and how that pertains to individual product and project strategies.”

Back to basics

When it comes to the RuneScape brand as a whole, it’s the retro-themed Old School RuneScape that has been stealing the show for some time now; the game keeps breaking subscription and concurrent user records, while the modern RuneScape has been less popular.

Jagex admits that it has made some missteps with modern RuneScape over the years. In 2026, the company is embarking on what it calls an “integrity roadmap,” dubbed The Road to Restoration, which will, among other things, see the studio tweak the MMO’s visuals to be more consistent, in addition to making changes to game balance and modernising combat. That’s on top of a UI and UX overhaul to make the game less intimidating, with the aim of bringing back lapsed users and attracting new ones.

Much of the ethos that Jagex is approaching RuneScape with in 2026 is inspired by the success it has had with Old School.

“One of the questions to arrest ourselves is what fundamentally RuneScape’s DNA is. What’s helped us be successful?” Dobrowski says.

“It boils down to a few things. Everything from the IP to the whimsical nature of the adventure that RuneScape delivers is quintessentially British. But more than that, it’s the very close relationship we have with our community and the way we work with it on pretty much everything we do.

“We decided last year that it was important for RuneScape to return to that DNA. The integrity strategy is largely to return to that primordial DNA, to strip back things that we have added. Sometimes, I think, we’ve chased some of our competitors or followed trends. We want to do what we do best and be authentically RuneScape again. With the integrity roadmap, we’re changing the light bulbs, fixing the streets, and getting the game back to what it should be.”

“Everything from the IP to the whimsical nature of the adventure that RuneScape delivers is quintessentially British”

There’s an interesting remark in Dobrowski’s last answer that does give some indication to why the current leadership believes RuneScape ended up as it is – that Jagex at times looked towards external inspiration for where the game’s future lies. That suggested a company losing confidence in itself, but under this new approach, it feels like Jagex has a clearer picture of what RuneScape is, something reflected by a change in the voices guiding development.

“[The company] started to look at what other games were doing and hired more people who had worked at other studios. They joined with their own preconceptions of what works and what we should do,” says Dobrowski, who himself joined Jagex in 2025, having previously worked at the likes of Playground Games, Mediatonic, CCP, and Sharkmob.

“There were a bunch of long-term players who joined Jagex because they were deeply passionate and just wanted to work on RuneScape. They didn’t really have as much of a creative voice in the team as they should have done. Partly, I think, because we brought in people from outside Jagex who had real credibility, and looked to them for the future. We’ve been rebalancing that. We still have people on the team who have been there, done that elsewhere, but there is a much greater voice from our hardcore RuneScape people. They just have a feeling of what RuneScape should be. We’ll still validate, stress test and work with the community to ensure that those feelings are right, but we’re leading from the heart again in a way that I don’t think we have done for quite some years.”

So long, microtransactions

Another major decision regarding RuneScape is the removal of Treasure Hunter, the game’s gacha-based microtransaction (MTX) mechanic. That was axed on January 19, 2026, following a public poll.

This came in the wake of Jagex community research, which found that “over 80%” of respondents said they had stopped playing because of Treasure Hunter.

In 2024 – the most recent year for which Jagex has filed accounts with Companies House – the firm reported £23 million in MTX revenue. That’s just 15% of the studio’s total revenue for the year. Subscriptions, meanwhile, clocked in at £118.5 million, representing 78% of Jagex’s 2024 revenue.

Taking away the MTX revenue stream comes with risk, but Jagex is hoping it could bring players back.

“We’re obviously going to take a revenue hit because we’ve removed that big MTX system, but, if we do the right thing in other parts of the game, membership should start to lift up again,” Dobrowski explains. “We would much rather end up in a situation like Old School, where most of our revenue comes from subscription fees, because people are loving what they’re seeing and playing.”

Jagex will still be selling cosmetics and bonus XP boosts, which give players more experience points for their tasks, as straight-up purchases.

“[Selling] cosmetics is very common across the industry. But we want to have a very clear value proposition with regular releases of new cosmetics that players can buy,” Dobrowski says. “The other piece is bonus XP. The idea is that it lets people who are incredibly busy with their lives, relatively time poor, still feel like they can play RuneScape without being pushed to one side.”

Alongside RuneScape, Jagex also released survival game Dragonwilds into Steam Early Access in 2025. The title beat expectations and has sold north of 1.1 million units to date. It clearly has an audience, although the makeup of it isn’t obvious.

Old School RuneScape caters to those who want to play the MMO in its 2007 glory days, while RuneScape is for those who might want a more modern experience. Dragonwilds, meanwhile, sits in a strange position. It’s a RuneScape game, but it’s also a survival game, a separate although highly popular genre.

“When we did our Early Access last year, we were really positively a little bit surprised but very happy at how many RuneScape players came to play the game,” Dobrowski says.

“We want to do more for those players. Similar to our other games, we want to work very closely with the Dragonwilds community to build the game for them. We ask ourselves a lot how much we lean into RuneScape, and how much we lean into the survival audience. We believe there is a great game that can serve both audiences. We’ll pull some people into RuneScape, who just want to appreciate and enjoy the genre and then fall in love with the franchise, and people who are already loving the franchise that want to see it through a different medium.”

“Success will be measured in how the community feels”

A pivotal year lies ahead, but the company’s grand plans don’t end in 2026.

“I’d love to see the franchise as a whole continuing to grow,” Dobrowski says. “Old School is already doing well there, but this is our biggest roadmap in the game’s history. For RuneScape, we would love the community to feel proud of the game they’re playing and for our staff and our team to feel proud of what they deliver. We want to fully rejuvenate RuneScape and for people to feel confident that it has a very bright future ahead of it. Success will be measured in how the community feels. We’ll also be releasing Dragonwilds later this year, so we have to bring RuneScape to a whole new audience.”

“Personally, 2027 will be bigger than 2026, so I’ve got a lot of work to do to prepare for that as well.”

Disclaimer: Alex Forbes-Calvin is a freelance writer who has worked previously worked with Jagex, including on the book RuneScape: The First 20 Years.