Jagex announced that its open world survival game RuneScape: Dragonwilds is now available in early access on Steam.

Jon Bellamy, who took over as CEO of Runescape publisher Jagex on March 4, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the game is a big bet on a new type of gameplay for RuneScape fans.

The title is set on the forgotten continent of Ashenfall in the RuneScape universe that is infested with dragons. In the game, players gather, craft, and wield powerful magic in a co-op survival adventure powered by Unreal Engine 5.

Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Jagex is doing a deep dive today and talking about the new adventure with fans. Only by mastering survival and uncovering ancient secrets can you hope to slay the Dragon Queen—alone or with allies.

It’s a big bet for RuneScape, an online game world which has generated $3 billion to date and has had 300 million registered users over the decades. The game still has 1.3 million active subscribers, Bellamy said. In December 2024, the 24-year-old game had the highest membership levels it ever had. Bellamy sees it as a game for making memories and stirring nostalgia.

Today the RuneScape massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) franchise includes both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, on PC and mobile, offer ever-evolving, highly active worlds and community-focused development.

The new RuneScape: Dragonwilds adventure blends magic, high fantasy with light RPG elements and iconic RuneScape lore. Players can do a solo journey or team up with up to three friends across Ashenfall, which has never been explored before. Bellamy said the company built the game on community feedback, with multiple closed alpha tests to assess fan reaction to the design.

Bellamy himself has played more than 100 hours of the game, which has co-op modes and is replayable.

“It’s going to be very familiar to players,” Bellamy said. “It’s a new take on something familiar.”

A longtime fan and a corporate merry-go-round

Paul and Andrew Gower began building in a kitchen in Nottinghamshire in 1998. They launched it in 2001 and it was a success. In 2013, Jagex launched Old School RuneScape to revert back to a 2007 version of the game. It did so because players signed a petition saying they wanted the old game back.

Jagex bounced around a bit lately. In 2016 Jagex was purchased by Hongtou, a Chinese investment company, which was subsequently acquired by Zhongji Holdings, which later changed its name to Fukong Interactive Entertainment. Jagex was sold for $530 million to Macarthur Fortune Holding in April 2020.

In the midst of the pandemic in 2021, the company was acquired by Carlyle in 2021. In 2022, Jagex expanded with the acquisition of Gamepires, which made SCUM, a multi-million selling open-world survival title.

Then CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments acquired Jagex in February 2024. Back in March, Bellamy was appointed CEO of Jagex to succeed Phil Mansell, who served as CEO since 2017.

“This is the dream job for me,” Bellamy said. “I’ve been playing RuneScape for 20 years. I worked briefly at Jagex for three or four years about a decade ago, and then was asked by CVC, (the current owners alongside Haveli), to help evaluate Jagex as a business.”

Bellamy has had plenty of training as he has been a RuneScape player for more than two decades. He served on Jagex’s board since 2024 and he held executive roles at Jagex from 2015 to 2018. He was also an exec at social casino game company Huuuge Games from 2019 to 2023.

Mansell, who worked as CEO for eight of his 14 years at Jagex, will advise Bellamy for a time and said in a statement that Bellamy cares about the company’s games and business. Bellamy seems himself as a steward for the game franchise that means so much to millions.

Bellamy did so and CVC and Haveli acquired Jagex later. He served on the board and was removed from that role when Mansell decided to step down. The owners did an evaluation and then appointed Bellamy as CEO back in March. Running the company is not nearly the same as being a fan or developer.

“I have to remind myself every day that I’m not a game designer,” Bellamy said.

He’s happy to preside over the launch of RuneScape’s first game in more than 10 years, and it has been in the works for more than three years with a team that has ranged from 30 to 50 people.

Investing in RuneScape: Dragonwilds

The game is perhaps Jagex’s biggest new product investment to date, yet it’s a small part of the 500 staff, which is heavily tasked with maintaining RuneScape and Old School RuneScape. When a game company is successful with titles like those ones, it’s not easy to launch a brand new game.

“For many years, we’ve been experimenting as a company, even during the last time I worked here 10 years ago, with what a RuneScape game would look like as an isometric game played over the shoulder, with Unreal graphics — what would the world look like?”

Bellamy credited Jesse America, executive producer, for taking a big swing and coming up with an approach of modern graphics in a much-loved universe that has been positively received by fans so far.

“They’ve basically been asking for a game like this for two decades now, and when we announced that Dragonwilds was now available to wish list just two weeks ago, people said it’s finally happening,” Bellamy said.

In the past two weeks, RuneScape: Dragonwilds has been wishlisted more than 350,000 times.

Asked why people still play the game, Bellamy said, “I get asked this a lot. It’s truly unique. It’s not an MMORPG in the way that many others are. For example, a quest in RuneScape is radically different, to say, a quest in World of Warcraft, where you might be asked to go and fetch a certain number of resources and bring them back to a person.”

He added, “A quest in RuneScape can be many hours of high-fantasy storytelling with tongue in cheek British humor. And I think that creates an alchemy charm that doesn’t really exist in many other games. And that’s why I think it over indexes in the U.S. and in the U.K. so well. Ultimately, it’s the kind of place that doesn’t rely on expansion packs to remain evergreen. It’s the kind of universe where you can quite happily spend years on end, and most players do.”

In fact, the average player lifetime is now more than five years, and you can spend many years of escapist fun in the universe without relying on expansion pack style releases, he said.

While Jagex bounced from owner to owner, Bellamy said the staff has been stable and has been for a number of years. Most of the team is game developers, and many of them have thousands of hours of play experience in RuneScape.

“We see a lot of people who’ve grown up playing the game and they recognize just how magical it is,” he said. “They dreamed of working on RuneScape as maybe a child or as a teenager growing up. Maybe they went and spent a few years at Deloitte or something to be an adult, and then realize, actually they still just want to come and work on RuneScape.”

In the past, the strategy was to broaden the company beyond its RuneScape roots. But Bellamy’s goal is to obsess over the core game and improve the player experience. He pays attention to active players as well as those who observe from the sidelines but still consider themselves part of the community.

The industry’s woes

As for the industry’s layoffs, he said, “It’s been an incredibly tough couple of years for the industry. There’s still a very large number of professionals who are out of work or looking for roles. And every time I open LinkedIn, I can see that firsthand. It’s not lost on me. The sustainability of the industry in the long term required some of that shake up.”

He added, “I think we did collectively over-hire with irresponsible practices during the COVID years in particular, and so we saw a reaction to that. All of that is shaking out of the system as we came back to normality. I think that’s a real shame that it happened in the way that it did, and that it coincided with some of the more structural changes, particularly within mobile gaming, with the introduction of ATT (Apple’s push for privacy over targeted ads). It feels like we’re at a confluence point now where the cost of development has never been higher.”

Add to that economic instability, and that makes it hard to invest in any new project.

He said, “It’s never been harder to build and release large scale, ambitious new games for those of us who are still trying to do it. We’re putting our best foot forward, but we also recognize that it’s much harder than it was a few years ago.”

And he said, “So while it’s easy to understand what has happened and why it has happened, we can honestly say in good faith that we’re we’re doing our best to push the industry forward and make the games that we think the industry deserves and the players want.”

Looking around the rest of the game industry, which is beset with layoffs and unsuccessful live service games, Bellamy thinks they have unsustainable practices, are unfinished, and have monetization models that are aggressive and don’t represent fair value anymore.

“I think the general gameplay experience for a live service game is worse than it was 10 years ago,” he said. “I think RuneScape and Old School RuneScape are an oasis in the desert. You pay a subscription fee and get access to the whole game for as long as you want.”

“I’m sure you’re seeing who is happy and who isn’t happy in the games ecosystem with the latest delayed releases. From my perspective, it seems like people are broadly unhappy. So if we can initiate some of that change and carry the torch, that’s a legacy we’re leaving,” he said.

While some may view gamers today as entitled, Bellamy doesn’t see it that way. He just attended RuneFest, which drew thousands of players to the U.K. It had a net promoter score of 89%.

“We can’t just say gamers are too entitled. That’s a quarter of the planet,” he said.

So he doesn’t want to expand beyond RuneScape.

“I don’t see it that way,” Bellamy said. “I actually think that being the RuneScape company is the very best thing that we can be. I think for games like ours that have generated multiple billions of dollars of revenue from hundreds of millions of players, there’s no shame in being successful.”