Old School RuneScape Is Challenging WoW's MMO Dominance

"The dream is that we're not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world, we're the number one."

That's John Bellamy, who returned to Jagex as CEO last March after a history that includes both private equity and, as it turns out, earlier time at the company itself. He was brought back to set things straight at a studio that has cycled through leadership and parent companies with uncomfortable regularity. So when a guy with that background makes a statement like that, the instinct is to file it under "investor posturing" and move on.

Bellular Warcraft's recent breakdown of Jagex's position in the MMO market suggests that filing system might need an update.

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The Graveyard Problem

The genre has a specific kind of gallows humor around the phrase "WoW killer." The list of games that tried — Warhammer Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, WildStar, take your pick — is long and mostly depressing. World of Warcraft has held the top MMO position for over two decades, and that's not an accident. Blizzard built a product that captured a generation and then spent years optimizing the machinery to keep them paying.

So the premise that Old School RuneScape, a point-and-click MMO whose visual DNA dates to 2007, represents a credible challenge to that throne deserves some scrutiny before anyone treats it as settled analysis.

What makes Bellular's case interesting is that it doesn't really argue for a WoW killer in the traditional sense — a game that absorbs WoW's audience through superior production values or IP. The argument is more structural than that, and structurally, it holds up better.

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What OSRS Actually Built

Old School RuneScape launched in 2013 as a direct response to player dissatisfaction with the direction RuneScape 3 was taking. The core mechanic of its development model is a polling system: before Jagex adds anything significant to the game, the player base votes on it. A supermajority has to approve it, or it doesn't go in. Full stop.

That sounds like it would produce a paralyzed, lowest-common-denominator game. In practice, it appears to have produced something closer to the opposite. Bellular points to a pair of cases that illustrate how the model functions under pressure. In 2021, Jagex told a fan developer to pull down his HD graphics mod, citing their own in-development upgrade. The community revolted, and Jagex reversed course within 24 hours — publicly celebrating the mod developer's work and sharing a release date for it. A year later, when players were using third-party clients with added features, Jagex didn't fight them. They published an approved client list and defined what features were off-limits.

These are not moves you typically see from studios. They're also not moves that come free of organizational cost, which is something worth sitting with. A development team that has formally committed to player polling for major content decisions is a development team with a constrained design mandate. That can read as empowering — the players are your compass — but it also creates a particular kind of pressure: every significant creative decision becomes a public vote that developers have to make a case for, defend, and sometimes absorb the rejection of. Whether Jagex's team experiences that model as energizing or grinding is not something the available reporting makes clear. What is clear is that the model produces fewer own-goals than the industry average.

The payoff, as Bellular frames it: "For Old School RuneScape, I think we broke just about every record we've ever had across every major metric in the last 12 months multiple times. It's on an unbelievable kind of heater." That's Bellamy speaking, and the concurrent player count data appears to bear it out. OSRS hit just shy of 260,000 players logged in simultaneously in January of this year, with a comparable peak in April — numbers that, regardless of where they rank on any given day's Steam charts, represent serious sustained engagement for a game from this era.

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The Progression Argument

The second structural piece of Bellular's case is about game design philosophy, and it's the more interesting one for understanding why players have been migrating.

World of Warcraft's modern architecture is seasonal. Progress resets. Content becomes obsolete with each new patch cycle. The new expansion renders the old one largely irrelevant. Bellular invokes Sisyphus — not flippantly. The seasonal MMO model asks players to invest enormous amounts of time in progress that will be administratively erased. That's a feature, in that it gives players a reason to keep logging in each season, but it's also a cost. You are, at some level, being paid in temporary currency.

OSRS is built on the opposite premise. Progress is horizontal and permanent. When the game world expands, earlier content doesn't become meaningless — it remains part of the accumulated record of what a player has done. Bellamy describes his ideal player as "millions of Deloitte consultants out there somewhere that have got Excel open on one screen and Old School on the other," and that framing is more precise than it sounds. The game is for people who find value in persistent, compounding effort — the kind of work that stays.

The player reviews Bellular quotes land this on both ends of the tonal spectrum. One calls OSRS "the most perfectly balanced mirror for showing how we understand striving for something or work as a whole." Another simply calls it "black tar heroin in video game form." Both are accurate.

This is where the WoW player migration story connects. Creator Mad Season documented what he called "The Great Exodus" — a wave of classic WoW streamers and players who, frustrated with the wait for Classic Plus, tried OSRS and found they couldn't put it down. The specific gravity was progression. WoW's classic audience already preferred a version of the game where your time investment compounded rather than evaporated. OSRS offered that, more completely and without the seasonal ceiling.

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The Asia Angle

The market expansion dimension of Jagex's pitch is where the numbers get genuinely interesting. According to Bellamy, RuneScape reached the second-largest MMO brand globally without any meaningful presence in Asia — literally zero. That changed when Jagex released RuneScape: Dragonwilds, an open-world co-op survival crafting spinoff announced on Jagex's official site, into Asian markets through a publishing deal. Per reporting by AllKeyShop.com, the game has surpassed 1.3 million copies sold, with Jagex stating that 40% of day-one sales came from China, with the region continuing to account for around 20% of ongoing sales.

That's a foothold acquired, to use the diplomatic phrasing, without excessive difficulty. Meanwhile, Blizzard's Asian presence is largely historical — built on a legacy player base that needs to be reactivated rather than a new audience being recruited. Jagex is out recruiting. That's a different kind of work, and in an industry where growth increasingly depends on global market penetration, being the one doing the recruiting rather than the reactivating is a structural advantage.

Whether OSRS itself, which has so far operated without dedicated Asian server infrastructure, follows Dragonwilds into that market is the open question. The ceiling on Jagex's audience growth, if they make that move, is not something the current numbers fully reflect.

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The Microtransaction Reset

One of the first things Bellamy did as CEO was strip massive amounts of microtransactions from RuneScape — the main game, not OSRS. Daily money-sink mechanics, progress-accelerating purchases, predatory monetization loops that had accumulated over years. Gone in January of this year.

Bellamy has since said openly that it was a significant revenue hit, and that they took it deliberately to reset the game's reputation to something defensible. This is the part that most studios never do. Not because they don't see the problem, but because the quarterly numbers don't allow for voluntary revenue contraction. The studios that clean up monetization messes usually do it under duress — regulatory pressure, public catastrophe, player boycott — not as a preemptive goodwill investment.

The question worth asking, and one that remains unanswered in public reporting, is what that revenue hit looked like for the people doing the development work. Studios that take voluntary revenue hits don't always absorb them at the executive level. Whether the monetization reset translated into any workforce impact — headcount decisions, contract changes, team restructuring — would tell you a lot about whether Jagex's leadership-with-heart philosophy distributes the cost or just the credit.

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What the Bet Actually Is

Bellular declines to say OSRS will overtake WoW. That's the honest read. Blizzard's Classic Plus, if executed well, is Blizzard's own version of the OSRS playbook — a living, developing classic game with an enormous existing IP behind it. If Classic Plus lands, the numbers advantage likely stays with Blizzard, especially in China. The Warcraft IP is a different category of cultural asset than RuneScape's.

But the bet Bellamy is making isn't that OSRS beats WoW tomorrow. It's that the industry calcifies around the wrong models, and Jagex keeps doing the boring, functional thing: listening, not resetting, not predating. The scoreboard for that kind of bet takes years to read.

Blizzard should be watching. Not because RuneScape is coming for their existing audience — it probably isn't. But because the players deciding which MMO gets their next thousand hours are increasingly the ones who can read the difference between a game built to retain them and a game built to farm them.

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Mike Wierzbicki covers game development, studio business, and industry labor for Buzzrag.