Runescape Userbase Statistics

Sort of expected, basing it from personal experience. During the release there was huge hype and lots of players signing up to join in, new players to see what the fuss is about and old for nostalgia sake.

I actually quit just before the userbase dropped (I'm sure others felt the same and the userbase dropped). A friend of mine borrowed the account to bot on, continued even after the warning 2 week ban, and eventually got it perm banned. If it wasn't banned, I'd have played a few months later again. If I played, it wouldn't be for too long, probably on and off every few months. Last year the NMZ was released, it wasn't known how good of a afkable training spot it is. I think that may play a factor, because if I was playing now I'd definitely have been doing it on my free time. I was actually talking to someone how I'd come back if I already had a decent account.

What's a surprise to me is during the drop they didn't play RS3 and quit instead. And how their userbase is actually growing, not just people switching between RS3 and OS.

 

They could hardly lose more players. Think about what percentage of the current players are maxed, or close to maxed? Most of their regular playerbase gave up during 2012-2014- the people left behind were the maxed die-hards, 2007 players, or post-eoc/07 newbs who don't know what RS was like prior to microtransaction heavy play.

 

I still don't consider it growth in my opinion. I understand numbers don't lie, but the game just doesn't show any signs of growth. It has stagnated since '11. The same kids who botted, are still botting. The same guys who had billions, still have billions. I rarely see a legitimate newb nowadays.

 

suprised the numbers haven't just straight plummeted. Then again I haven't played RS in a while, maybe things are better now.

 

When I used to play it was 100k plus online at all times

 

People need to remember that Jagex is just a business like any other. Their primary goal is to increase shareholder wealth. The majority shareholder of Jagex LTD. is Insight Venture Partners, a VC firm from the USA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight_Venture_Partners

They took a controlling stake in the company sometime prior to 2010. This firm invests in all types of businesses and at the end of the day, Jagex is simply another piece of their portfolio. While Jagex investors will push pay-to-win updates like Bonds in order to increase Revenue per User, they also strongly want to push growth. Growth is one of the most valuable metrics in a company. A company with strong growth will have its revenues valued much higher than a company with flat or negative growth.

Therefore, it's quite clear that Jagex has every motivation to focus on increasing the size of its userbase. The growth in its userbase creates shareholder wealth. And I think they've done a good job at listening more to what other players want, instead of treating their players like a bunch of idiots. They have realized that being more honest to their players makes their players more likely to remain active users. With open forums like Reddit, players can communicate much more freely among each other as well, so lying to your playerbase will be very obvious to the community.

In the past, Jagex has released major changes to the game, and their userbase has spiked briefly but tapered off. Look at the spike for Runescape 2007. While the release created a huge stir initially, it began tapering off very quickly. Their retention rates were very low following new content. The same was likely true for Free Trade in 2011. They had a major spike, but had trouble retaining a large portion of those users.

I think the difference today is that Jagex is retaining their older players for longer periods of time. They are making updates which appeal to their current userbase through the player-content polls. Their current users feel more empowered with how the game moves going forward, and therefore are more likely to be satisfied with content changes.

 

Removal of free trade killed RS, I loved it before that :c

 

Very interesting. I wonder how this graph would turn out if rs07 and legacy mode wasn't released at all.

 

R2pleasent u always have kool info mate. Thxs=)

 

Owner of that data there:
I've overhauled the page to hopefully aid people in analytics of the population changes.

If I inadvertently removed a feature that helped you out, please let me know so I can add it back.

 

Miss the old days of runescape, but very happy to see it start to grow again.

 

Awesome mate, I will keep an eye on it and let you know. Perhaps a metric which takes average users online each day so that you can easily compare one day to the next.

 

Is this what you were looking for? Let me know if you were thinking something different.

http://misplaceditems.com/rs_tools/graph/?display=avg&interval=day

 

rs3 sucks lol

 

That's very good, thank you

 

These stats don't look 100% Accurate but if these are true than it doesn't explain why the game looks like it's dying just from my view.