Q&A: PHIL MANSELL
With RuneScape going from strength to strength and an Unreal Engine 5 game in development, Jagex is celebrating a year that has delivered two studio acquisitions and new publishing deals. For CEO Phil Mansell, however, the challenge is to remain disciplined and focused on supporting and delivering for its teams, partners and communities
Let’s start with third-party publishing, which has been all the rage recently. Jagex was doing it, your neighbour set up Frontier Foundry, Sumo has established Secret Mode as an indie publisher. How have you fared? I’d say that we’re in a somewhat different position than others. You’ve got quite a lot of dedicated indie or mid-market publishers that are out there and a lot of them do really well. There’s so much good content out there. It’s not an easy business. If it were easy, even more people would be doing it. You’ve got to understand the customer. You’ve got to understand how to do right by your developers. You have to understand how to take a game to market at a high quality. I think for us, we look at it a little bit differently compared to some of the others, in that we don’t have to ship five to ten games a year to keep our business running. We can be selective. We can choose the
games that really make sense for our skill set, for our areas of interest. Generally, it’s the community-driven vibe that we have, that’s our connecting thread that we want to see; not just the game but how the developer works and if they’re really into that. So yeah, I think we’re in probably a somewhat more advantageous position. We haven’t got an arbitrary number of games we have to publish. We’re very fortunate that we’ve got a very successful scale business already with our RuneScape games and the other games that we’re building, as well as our acquisitions. So we can be patient. We can find the right partners and the right games and make sure we can offer them a great service and help them build a community. You’ve got to be selective and we’re in a position where we’re very fortunate that we can do that; really make sure that when we sign up with people, we can do right by them and their players.
Phil Mansell, CEO Jagex
February 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 27
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