Jagex being sold again (2023)

[Red Bracket]

Carlyle, the current owners of Jiggleflex, are looking to sell it for ~1.2B USD, with confirmation sometime before the end of the year^[1]. There is no firm buyer yet, so it's too early to say if the new owners will wreck it (and boost RSPS numbers), but anything is possible.

Redditors (archive^[2]) are already speculating this is why Jiggleflex has been aggressively pushing content to boost their KPIs (similar to what Reddit with banning 3rd party apps and recreating the "Place" event pre-IPO). Some quotes:

Well now it makes sense. A new skill release to inflate player numbers. An aggressive monetization scheme to pump up KPIs to make it look more lucrative investment. Devs being mostly silent as they're scrambling for some appeasable solution while being put between a rock and hard place by community and owners. Hopefully I'm wrong.

just to be clear, ive been pointing this out for years. most investment companies only plan around 5 years ahead when looking at profit or investments. the carlye group has owned jagex for 2.5-3 years now, so its totally expected that in the next 2 years or so they would be looking to sell it, unless the carlyle group thinks jagex will still be relevant in another 8 years. this is why they are so MTX heavy the sole goal is to milk as much money from the existing player base as possible.

the exact same thing has happened to dozens probably hundreds of other video games, theyre sold off by the developer, the new owners are an investment company and their sole goal isnt to grow the game, its to make as much profit as possible in around 5 years and then sell it off for as much as you can (maybe after holding a bunch of fresh start world events or whatever that artificially boost membership numbers and play times)

the fact people thought this wasnt the fate of runescape is insane. ive had arguments in this sub before with people arguing that "no the carlyle group wants to make runescape successfull long term its why theyre making new skills and constant updates". that isnt how an investment company thinks, they arent game developers they only care about profit. it would be different if say jagex was purchased by activision or ubisoft, game developers are the ones who care about keeping the game running, because they see value in the IP's they invest in. the carlyle group probably sees little value in the runescape IP beyond what their annual profit is.

Lol, of course the necro and hero pass were meant to inflate apparent future potential of the game by manipulating stats

The OSRS community sentiment was equally realistic. While there currently exists no playable-ly decent open source RS3/OSRS remake, it's possible one will spawn should things far enough south. In either case, the real storm (if any) is 6-12 months out, so let's keep our eyes peeled.

[The RWBY Phoenix]

Honestly, I hope whoever the new owners don't fail absolutely right off the bat, I like the slowly increasing playerbase here of largely nostalgic players

A sudden and massive influx of current OSRS or even RS3 players may cause a significant bit of chaotic adjustment periods

Either way though, I have faith in the staff here. On being able to handle it at least, could do with a few less ice barrages by invisible mad gods, but you win some, you lose some lol

[Red Bracket]

If a huge exodus happens, maybe we can temporarily grant Pmod status to every current, dedicated player for crowd control

[Ceikry]

I would probably find a way to limit the influx of new users to ensure assimilation into the existing culture is still possible. I would quit this project with 0 hesitation if the community culture suddenly switched to that of OSRS/RS3 due to an uncontrollable influx of those users.

[Red Bracket]

We could make a temporary application process (i.e. something like a Google Forum) that requires selecting a certain number of text boxes before registration.

[ ] I understand this is a 2009 remake, and does not have OSRS content
[ ] I understand 2009 was a much harder era, with harsh deaths, no pray flicking, and scarce NPC loot
[ ] I understand this is a heavily moderated project, and any 4chan/Reddit style remarks will get me banned without warning
[ ] In addition to the above rules, I will read and follow the in-game rules seen upon tutorial completion

If you do not like the above rules, this project may not be a good fit. Possibly consider other, open source remake servers, including:

2004scape.org
2011scape.com
Darkan.org

Please enter a brief application description as to why you want to play 2009scape, and how you are compatible with our rules:
[ Text Area ]

[Red Bracket]

I do wish there was a successful OSRS remake project though

[The RWBY Phoenix]

We could make a temporary application process (i.e. something like a Google Forum) that requires selecting a certain number of text boxes before registration.

[ ] I understand this is a 2009 remake, and does not have OSRS content
[ ] I understand 2009 was a much harder era, with harsh deaths, no pray flicking, and scarce NPC loot
[ ] I understand this is a heavily moderated project, and any 4chan/Reddit style remarks will get me banned without warning
[ ] In addition to the above rules, I will read and follow the in-game rules seen upon tutorial completion

If you do not like the above rules, this project may not be a good fit. Possibly consider other, open source remake servers, including:

2004scape.org
2011scape.com
Darkan.org

Please enter a brief application description as to why you want to play 2009scape, and how you are compatible with our rules:
[ Text Area ]

I 1000% support this, I'd rather there be a slightly annoying buffer layer so that we weed out the people who would slap in a username and pw and go straight to the discord with complaints, yuck.

[ryannathans]

[ ] I understand this is a heavily moderated project

I don't agree. There are not a lot of rules, we aren't scanning for vulgar language and mutes and bans are very infrequent (which is rather rare for a large project) and well justified, typically due to numerous player reports.

Maintaining gameplay integrity, and in regards to exploits/bugs? Sure, without integrity there's no game to enjoy, but I wouldn't call that heavy moderation. I prefer to sit back and let players resolve their disputes organically rather than constant active involvement in "moderation".

[Deathking333]

Carlyle, the current owners of Jiggleflex, are looking to sell it for ~1.2B USD, with confirmation sometime before the end of the year^[1]. There is no firm buyer yet, so it's too early to say if the new owners will wreck it (and boost RSPS numbers), but anything is possible.

Redditors (archive^[2]) are already speculating this is why Jiggleflex has been aggressively pushing content to boost their KPIs (similar to what Reddit with banning 3rd party apps and recreating the "Place" event pre-IPO). Some quotes:

Well now it makes sense. A new skill release to inflate player numbers. An aggressive monetization scheme to pump up KPIs to make it look more lucrative investment. Devs being mostly silent as they're scrambling for some appeasable solution while being put between a rock and hard place by community and owners. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Another point to add to this, Jagex's inaction when it comes to dealing with the bots in OSRS. They're everywhere in OSRS, but Jagex seems more interested in banning legitimate players than actual bots. Knowing this now, perhaps they're intentionally turning a blind eye to the bots. With there being a bunch of bots in the game, it artificially inflates the player count, making the game seem more active than it actually is to potential buyers and investors.

[Red Bracket]

Knowing this now, perhaps they're intentionally turning a blind eye to the bots. With there being a bunch of bots in the game, it artificially inflates the player count, making the game seem more active than it actually is to potential buyers and investors.

No speculation, Mod Mat K said it himself

Excerpt from Mat K:

Mat K: "Here's what I think is gonna happen - if we were to ban all bots now, one I think we could all agree the economy would go to shit - for a long time."

RiceCup: "There would be some destabalization, of course"

Mat K: "You say some, I say massive destabalization. I've got scenes of the end of Fight Club where they blow up big banking buildings - that sort of destruction to the economy. But the other thing that would happen is you are gonna be forced to do things you don't want to do. If you think about how people play games now, people play games now very differently to how they played games 5 years ago or 10 years ago. It was quite comfortable to go "I will go and pick flax for 5 hours cause I know I'm gonna get some stuff off of it". [...] But I don't want to do that. I want to go and kill bosses, I want to go and fight things, I want to go and do the stuff I want to do. I don't want to have to go and do boring stuff like picking flax, or making food [...]. People are going to be forced to do stuff they don't want to do. And that's the big thing to me - Economy goes to shit, and people doing stuff they don't really want to do, they want to get to the good content, and that to me is what would happen if we were to get rid of bots, and that is not a good thing. [...] I can't think of a quicker way to get people to stop playing your game. [...] The outcome to this is bots are essential for you guys to play the game you want to play."

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And on a Further timestamp:

Mat K: "If I look at the first way we looked at dealing with bots in Oldschool Runescape - I don't know if anybody actually knows this but uhh, if not, shit happens.. I'll have lawyers on the phone - The first thing we did was created bot worlds, in order to move people who we think are bots into bot worlds. Because we couldn't be sure we could ban the bots. We didn't particularly want to ban bots anyways, because if we banned all the bots then suddenly it could be that we have no support left for the game. So if you think about from a corporate point of view, Oldschool Runescape makes X amount of money. If it makes less money, you get less developers to work on the game, which means you can't turn the game into something better [...]. So one of the risks was "Ok, if we actually ban all the bots at the very beginning, or people we believe are bots, do we actually lose support for the game, and the game will just die through degregation. So we created bot worlds - and that was to move bots away from people into a separate world so we could make the impact of them [demoralizing real players] less."

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I'm not gonna keep going through it, but at a later point in the interview Mat K says something about how if there was a button he could press to ban all bots, he wouldn't press it. From the above quotes, it seems obvious why.