thinking. That’s what made it what I’d call a ‘sweet-spot partnership’ for us. A game that’s great, huge potential, at scale, where we know we can add a lot of value on the publishing side, but the team themselves are clearly not just super super skilled, they’re already very community-orientated – so that match was ideal. Pipeworks is more about building the Jagex


infrastructure out. Pipeworks was about talent. Pipeworks have 200 extremely talented devs in AAA games-as-a-service. They’re in North America, the West Coast, over in Oregon. They have a strong business and amazing track record, but their skill set exactly matches us. There’s not that much of that around and it was a way for us to get a great team. It was a way to get a geographic presence and build our talent base in North America. Because really, we’ve just been centred around the UK and Europe so far. Pipeworks do have their own IP, but the majority of their efforts go into working with partners like EA, Microsoft, Activision, Wizards of the Coast.


What is the main thrust of your strategy? Last year when Unreal Engine 5 came out, you were pretty quick in saying you’re doing something internally with that. Obviously, you’ve got RuneScape which is a massive thing and now with SCUM as well, so it seems like you are pushing forward on all fronts. Is that the case? The long term ambition is to be the world’s most community-driven games company. From that, we work out what are the best things to focus on. Now clearly the core of our long-term business has been our RuneScape MMORPGs. We’re going to continue to grow those games and those communities that support both technological and design innovations we’re working on for the future, especially ones that play into that sort of community driven idea. That’s at the heart of the company. So we’re always gonna be super serious about RuneScape. We do want to do more with the RuneScape universe. We’ve been working on it for over 20 years. There’s huge amounts of creative energy in there that we want to do more with. So, as you


say, we have a new game we’re building internally - a couple of new games actually - within the RuneScape universe, not necessarily MMORPGs in the same way that the existing games are, but looking at adjacent opportunities where our interests and skills also make sense with the RuneScape brand and what it means to people. Obviously we want to grow and expand and use RuneScape as a way of doing that. But it also occurs to us, if we really care about building better communities, we’ve got skills where we can help other people do that. Obviously we’ve been building communities with our RuneScape games and working really closely with players for a long time. So how can we leverage our skills to help grow the


company and achieve this ambition? So that’s in a few ways. One is investing in our underlying technology. So our platform to be able to provide services and features – and the analytics, the ecommerce, the community features – that sit under all of our games, modernising that so it can not just be great for our RuneScape and old school games, but for all our other games and our


“For me, that’s the connection with RuneScape and our wider ambitions around building a very community- driven company . It’s not just a product, it’s how you make it and how you work with the community”


partners’ games. It’s also saying, ‘Okay, if this is something we are


really passionate about, we think we’re quite good at and we can help other people, how can we express that and find opportunities?’ Third-party publishing is one aspect of that, are there partners for whom they are very community orientated but what they don’t feel they need to do is build their own publishing organisation. That’s where we can take their technical and creative skills and our


February 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 29


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