publishing and community methodologies and combine those together and get the best of both. The same, in a way, applies with acquisitions. Now, the acquisitions, certainly in the case of Gamepires or SCUM, bringing them into the wider Jagex family and giving them support in a sort of company sense, but there’s also them being able to benefit from Jagex Partners’ go-to-market publishing skills and help them build that community
“We’ve set our company up such that we all benefit from the shared technology, the broader community that we’re building, and the institutional skills of the company”
and take that to the next level, taking that to a full launch and taking it further around the globe. Taking that on to consoles as well, is a really big manoeuvre. We’re supporting Gamepires not just on the publishing side, but also helping them with more intense, wider development efforts. Ideally SCUM becomes for us another evergreen game where millions of people play every month and they do so for decades to come. That’s our ambition.
What’s planned for this year? Are we going to see more acquisitions, a new game reveal at some point? What’s on the cards? I want to be clear. We’re not going to be buying up every company that we see or doing very high volumes of
publishing deals. We aren’t trying to be a publishing- first company. For us, third party publishing and mergers and acquisitions are tools in our toolbox to build the Jagex family of studios and portfolio of games. But it’s definitely about being selective. We’re not like a Katamari ball rolling around the industry, absorbing everyone in our path. We’re much more careful and selective. It’s brilliant that we’ve got the backing and scale and confidence to be able to make serious acquisitions and investments and also do great publishing deals, but we don’t need to hit a schedule or acquire a company a quarter in order to please the market. So there aren’t any imminent acquisitions to talk about, but we continue to talk with people around the industry and see what opportunities are out there.
How difficult is it being a publisher that’s synonymous with a game with a massive orbit like RuneScape, where you don’t want to be in a position where you’re gonna burn up in the atmosphere if it starts to decline, but you don’t want to shoot off and leave it behind either. It seems like it’s a balance that takes years to find and I’m wondering if you feel like you’ve found it now? That’s a good question. It’s really important for us that our RuneScape games and our partnerships don’t undermine each other. We’ve set our company up such that we all benefit from the shared technology, the broader community that we’re building, and the institutional skills of the company - but we’re not begging or borrowing from within the company. Our Jagex Partners team is dedicated to our partners. We built that team so that there’s no contention inside our company for attention and skills and resources between our internal teams and our partners. That’s really important to make sure that they know that. You know, our RuneScape games together make well north of £100 million of revenue a year and have millions and millions of customers. We want that to be seen and to be used as a benefit to partners, not something that overshadows them. So that’s, I think, really important to say and, yeah, it has taken us a while to build the right internal structures in the company so that there’s a benefit from what we’ve got. It’s also why we haven’t signed another MMORPG, right? We’re not trying to compete. We don’t design games that compete with the ones we already have. It’s really important that they are complimentary.
When Jagex was acquired in 2001, did that provide the stability you needed - a platform to launch from? Massively, yeah, Having an investor base that is professional, long term, supports our growth and the
30 | MCV/DEVELOP February 2023
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