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Runescape hits 200 million registered players

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RuneScape’s just hit – yes that Runescape – has just hit 200 million registered players, which makes the eleven year old Cambridge-developed MMO the “most played online game in history, dwarfing the sales of FIFA and the Call of Duty series combined”. Honestly yes, that RuneScape. The plucky pioneer of online fantasy clicks has been quietly amassing an impressively lengthy list of players. Jagex claim that in total, those 200 million players have racked up more than 443 billion minutes of gaming since RuneScape’s launch in 2001 – that’s one and a half days each.

A press release light-heartedly posits a hypothetical country populated by these RuneScape players that would have a population3.21 times larger than that ofthe UK, “boasting the fifth largest population in the world”. Imagine that. Imagine living there. Maybe it would help you to know that in this fictional country there would be “ten LOLs per second”? What a fun place! Althoughpresumably a couple of players have sinceleft, or even died. I mean, these aren’t 200 millionconcurrentplayers, that’d be madness. It’s 200 million playersever, animpressive milestone that Jagex are the first to claim.

Speaking in a press release, Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard said: “When the game was first released, nobody could ever have expected it would reach such high levels of popularity largely by community word of mouth. It has been an incredible journey to get to where we are today, and by continuing our tradition of constantly innovating, evolving and lovingly crafting RuneScape we are certain to continue to break records by creating an online adventure like no other.”

Good job RuneScape and, by extension all of Britain, on having so many registered players. First the Olympics, now this!