Sunday, May 06, 2007

Runescape Houses Boost Membership

Runescape Houses provided a boost to runescape members - people subscribing on a monthly basis. It can be viewed as a significant success in the development of runescape by Jagex.

Extract from an interview with runescape co-founder Andrew Gower:

  1. What do you feel has been the biggest differentiating factor behind RuneScape's popularity in making it to the one million subscriber milestone?
  • AG: I think one of the biggest things is the game's continual updates. We're constantly adding to the game, bringing new stuff in and improving it. It's interesting, but with each addition, we see surges of growth.
  • We saw a huge surge with our recent addition of player houses, and again with our recent graphics update. The fact that we keep updating it, adding more to the experience, I think is key. Plus, people like having things to look forward to.
The full Andrew Gower interview can be viewed here.

Personally, I am not surprised that player owned houses provided a major boost to subscription levels as it was one of the most waited for additions to the game for a long time. I think it had a waiting time of 2 years or so.

However, after the initial boost to subscriptions and after people tried out their runescape houses, it would be interesting to find out how many people were disappointed and subsequently went back to free to play runescape servers.

Obviously those figures would be very hard to quantify as people choose to leave membership for a variety of reasons - normally to do with real life rather than any game specific reason.

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