RuneScape has been running in various forms for nearly two decades, and against all odds the ancient MMO is still going strong – in fact, it had a record-setting 2019. A lot of these numbers are driven by Old School RuneScape in particular, but all told the games drew in over a million paying subscribers in 2019.
“Jagex’s RuneScape franchise achieved its highest-ever player membership peak in 2019,” the company says in a press release, “with RuneScape and Old School RuneScape attracting more than 1.1 million paying subscribers, in addition to the many millions who enjoy the free-to-access content.”
Old School RuneScape reached its highest ever number of daily active players in 2019, thanks in large part to the mobile version which launched the year before. The mobile version has now been installed over 8 million times. 2019 also marked an “all-time membership high” for the series – though every day is presumably a new all-time membership high, unless old accounts keep getting deleted.
A fan-made tool which tracks officially reported player counts shows how the numbers break down over different versions of the game. OSRS represents the vast majority of active players each day, and its lead spiked after the mobile release, while standard RuneScape’s numbers remained mostly flat in 2019. (It’s worth noting that players anecdotally report far more bots in OSRS, however.)
This all serves as a good reminder that while MMORPGs have faded a bit from the spotlight, some of the genre’s most venerable entries are still going strong.