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u/Just-Ad3485 Mar 11 '26
This OSRS vs RS3 narrative doesn’t help anyone except Jagex. We’re all getting fucked. Don’t get distracted.
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u/hkgsulphate A Seren spirit appears Mar 12 '26
Agreed but many OSRS folks been trashing RS3 for a very long time
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u/MayaIsSunshine Mar 11 '26
I'm worried about Jagex's shareholders. What would they do without an additional million in revenue every year?
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u/Consistent-Ad-3351 Mar 11 '26
They would take their investments to a different more profitable company leaving jagex without the capital to continue to create their games. This whole shareholders don't matter sentiment is so childish and illuminates a clear misunderstanding of how the world works.
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Mar 13 '26
£26.7-33.4 million additional revenue to Jagex if this doesnt backfire and membership trends continue
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u/DunKhaerion Thalassia's Revenge Mar 11 '26
Rs3 this, osrs that - we're both subsidizing for dragonwilds
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u/Bakugo_Dies Mar 11 '26
?
Can both subs just stop with this garbage. Dragonwilds sold a ton of copies and it's still EA, I'd be shocked if it wasn't a massive success for Jagex already.
RS3 and OSRS are independently profitable, just not enough for venture capital leeches.
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u/Will_Redd_It Will Miss It // rswillmissit Mar 11 '26
Tbh he does have a point. Jagex paid millions for Dragonwilds before they put it up for sales.Sure, they made it all back in sales - but OS and RS did pay for it initially.
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u/NinjaLion Mar 11 '26
If DW is a profitable venture for Jagex the company. If it came from membership profits and not a loan(normal) it means they arent eating any shit on interest for it; even LESS of an excuse to jack up prices on membership.
do we know for sure if they didnt get a loan, did make money on DW? genuine question, havent seen their financials
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u/Lamuks Master Max Mar 11 '26
They're a profitable company with enough people to rotate internally + they only hired a few as I remember from some job listings earlier. No reason to take out a loan.
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u/SyleSpawn Mar 12 '26
No reason to take out a loan.
Wait till you find out how many wealthy billionaires or massive corporation take out loan that are essentially free money for them. I'm not saying this specifically for Jagex but I wouldn't be surprise if loan financed some of their project.
Interest payments on loans are tax deductible. They effective pay less tax
The bigger point is wealthy people and big companies hold a lot of their value through assets and stocks. Selling stock trigger capital gain tax. Instead of selling $10m of their stock - which triggers a % of tax in the capital gain - they would take a loan of 10m and use the stock as collateral. This mean they effectively still own all their shares and they get to acquire more assets without having to pay taxes, in fact they're getting tax deductible.
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u/Lamuks Master Max Mar 12 '26
Technically you should be able to see if they took out a loan in their financials 1-3 years ago, since it takes a while to develop such a game.
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u/Will_Redd_It Will Miss It // rswillmissit Mar 12 '26
CVC took out a loan to buy Jagex, that Jagex is paying back - but not for Dragonwilds. That was taken from the subscription revenue over the past few years.
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u/Will_Redd_It Will Miss It // rswillmissit Mar 11 '26
Yeah - the financial reports estimate around 20 million pound since 2021 allocated to an unnamed project which must've been Dragonwilds. So no loan, luckily.
At the moment they've announced 1 million sales, so they've made a few million in profit.
Current job listings for the game goes on until early 2028, so the game is self-funding itself (for now).
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u/Xaelitry Mar 11 '26
This is the real problem, letting what is ostensibly a creative endeavor be controlled by VC parasites.
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u/CareApart504 Mar 11 '26
What? Osrs has been making more revenue than rs3 for like 7 years.
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u/Big_Chungussi69 Mar 11 '26
its weird how much copium some of us rs3 players huff, they probably still think the player count on the RS homepage is how many play RS3 lmao
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
It wasn't at the start. If it wasn't for RS3 subsidies to OSRS, Jagex could have killed off OSRS before it became profitable.
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u/Regular_Chap Mar 12 '26
When was OSRS not profitable though?
In the days where OSRS was below rs3 players there was like 3 people working on the game.
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
OSRS needs more than just 3 devs to get running. There are servers, managers, anti-cheat team, customer support, and other staff and costs both game had to share when OSRS could not pay for 50% of the cost.
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u/Regular_Chap Mar 12 '26
And at no point at the start was OSRS taking 50% of the resources/expenses.
Both games have been profitable since the addition of membership to the game.
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u/Doctor_Kataigida Mar 11 '26
Which is about half the time. So left image is the first 6 years of OSRS, right image is the last 7 years. Pretty near split tbh.
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u/Kumagor0 RIP Mar 12 '26
yeah except in the first years osrs team was like 1/10 of rs3, so it still made more per dev, rs3 literally never subsidized osrs
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u/CareApart504 Mar 12 '26
In the first year there were only 4 jmods on the osrs team not counting engine workers.
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u/Doctor_Kataigida Mar 12 '26
Being 1/10 of RS3 so...the main money came from RS3 and paid for the OSRS devs. Yes. RS3 subsidized a small OSRS team.
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u/Kumagor0 RIP Mar 12 '26
You can clearly see that even at the worst times osrs had half the players as rs3, so even during that time those membership clearly paid for osrs devs and then subsidized rs3 some.
I know math is hard so let me explain to you in simple terms:
Timmy eats 10 apples per day, while Jimmy only eats one. Timmy makes 22 bucks per day, while Jimmy makes 11. It means Jimmy spends 3 bucks on his apple, then gives the rest 8 bucks to Timmy so he can spend total of 30 bucks on his 10 apples. Jimmy is subsidizing Timmy, not the other way round.
Hope this helps.
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u/Doctor_Kataigida Mar 12 '26
You probably didn't mean to sound condescending but it came across that way.
I'm not sure I'd trust that website's numbers. Looking at the waybackmachine, in October 2013, there's a snapshot where RS3 showed 42k players online. Even if that's a combination of RS3 and OSRS, that's still 6k more than what that website says.
Or February 16, 2014 (Sunday) at 7pm says 72k players online, but that site says only 47k? That's over 50% off. Compared to OSRS in the same month on Sunday the 9th at 9pm (so comparable day of the week/times) we see 26k OSRS players. So that's almost 2:1 RS3 to OSRS at the time.
Or June 7th, 2015, at 10:25pm we see 165k online, while OSRS on the same day at 9:46pm says 42k. So that's 3:1 RS3 to OSRS.
Not to mention that a lot of RS3 players were also playing OSRS as alts when it launched, for the purpose of funding their RS3 accounts (myself included).
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u/MindlessAdvantage506 Mar 11 '26
Nobody argues osrs makes more, but when you compare player count vs player count and revenue vs revenue, rs3 players generate more per user.
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u/hkgsulphate A Seren spirit appears Mar 12 '26
What stopped Jagex from adding almost zero MTX to OSRS! :D Pure revenue? You are implying any for profit company hates wanting more profits!?
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u/kitsunwastaken Mar 12 '26
It's about time they let us log onto both games with the same character. Realistically how many people are paying 2 subs to play both games simultaneously? Surely letting us log onto both games will only boost player numbers for both while barely impacting their subscription revenue
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u/arsenicx2 xpri2 Mar 11 '26
Can't play on both at the same time, but I have to pay a premium because I can access both. I will never touch RS3 again, and I don't see me ever paying for OSRS at these prices. Hope enough people actually cancel to bother the share holders, but I doubt it.
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u/Narmoth Music Mar 12 '26
IDK, have you seen their sub lately? They are far more pissed than we are.
Took me over a day to realize they removed the grandfathered rates. And Brazil? That is insane.
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u/PossibilityOk782 Mar 12 '26
Osrs makes more than rs3 by a ton even after accounting for the pay to win mechanics, also you understand osrs bonds are counted in the mtx numbers? Not even all of the small mtx revenue stream jagex gets comes from rs3, there are many, many more osrs bonds sold than rs3
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u/AdamantFullHelm Mar 16 '26
Just a good reminder. The game Oldschool RuneScape was created to make all those members that was lost to RS3 came back to the game. Basically the OSRS was made to mitigate RS3 problems.
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u/occasionallyrite Untrimmed Smithing :Mining: Mar 12 '26
Imagine if OSRS didn't have THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of bots that pay the membership fees. just to get banned.
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u/KobraTheKing Mar 11 '26
Both games fund themselves, they're not subsidizing eachother.
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u/adamfps Salty Wilk Mar 11 '26
Me when I learn about a company’s structure 🤯
Funny to hear people talk about finances of the company when they’ve never open an income statement in their entire life
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u/HecManRS Trimmed 9/21/14 Mar 11 '26
Would be surprised if RS3 was ever subsidized. Pretty sure they've downgraded the quality of RS3 servers several time over the years by how laggy they get with just a few hundred people now. Worlds used to have a cap of 2,000 people.
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u/yuei2 +0.01 jagex credits Mar 11 '26
Mainly lag comes from the systems upon systems, particularly the bank preset placeholder system actually adds a lot of intensity. There are other things that contribute as well like the way corrupt blast would continue to spread and kill stuff at GWD2 even if you aren’t there which had such an intense and tightly packed area of mobs it was causing crazy server strain which is why they cleared out the majority of the mobs from the area. There is also the graphical intensity compared to back then and just so many little things that add up.
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u/Deathmask97 Pax Tecum Mar 12 '26
Wait, could you elaborate about the bank preset strain on the servers? Do you have a source for that?
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u/Boukly Mar 12 '26
IDK about bank presets specifically but just opening your bank strains the server which I believe why they added the option to load your last preset as a right click. Also served as a nice QoL.
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u/firewolf397 Mar 11 '26
Osrs was added because jagex saw an increase in revenue. Private servers were more popular than runescape 3 and Jagex was hemorrhaging money by not adding it.
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
OSRS flopped on release and RS3 had to subsidize it before it can stand on its own.
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u/ForgotMyLastUN Mar 12 '26
What?
OSRS released with a skeleton crew of developers, but had half the player count of RS3 at release.
It took less than 2 years for the OSRS membership population to overtake RS3, and that was before they expanded the OSRS crew in 2018...
So OSRS had 1/10th the developers cost, while making half the membership revenue from RS3...
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
Keep looking further after release and until actual new content from OSRS drops.
Devs aren't the only costs for OSRS. There's management, anti-cheat staff, HR, marketing, customer support, and other staff that both game share.
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u/SolenoidSoldier Mar 11 '26
What I find funny is when OSRS folks were saying it's time to separate memberships, as if OSRS, the game with magnitudes more players, would be selected to be the cheaper of the two.
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u/Chandler15 Mar 12 '26
I mean, at least if that were the case it’d be easier to make demands of getting multiple characters per membership. But with RS3 and OSRS attached at the hip, it’s easier for Jagex to say “We need to increase the price to keep RS3 funded.” Mind you I’m not saying that’s the case, but from the corporate side, it makes sense to use a scapegoat like that.
So while you might have a point that big company sees big number, so big number means more money, but at least the consumer would have a bargaining chip at that point.
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u/Dry_Yogurtcloset_213 Mar 12 '26
When was OSRS ever subsidized by RS3? At the worst point of OSRS they had like 150K active subs but only 3 J-mods.
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u/WedgieKing200 Mar 11 '26
This is exactly how I feel. This is Karma. As a rs3 player, absolutely no reason osrs players should be allowed to vote for things happening in rs3.
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u/PomegranatePro Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
Osrs was already supporting RS3 through membership. The OSRS community doesn’t care about RS3.
The company is just greedy. It was sustainable years ago without bonds and micro-transactions They e been making hundreds of millions of dollars and cant manage to stop bots
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u/Cloud_N0ne Maxed Mar 11 '26
The OSRS community doesn’t care about RS3
They sure do bitch a lot about something they “don’t care about”.
At least they do when they’re not joking about drinking bull cum.
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u/imkindalostheremate Mar 11 '26
all they do is brag about having a bigger player base and how "shit" is RS3 even tho half of the player base beign bots
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u/WedgieKing200 Mar 11 '26
If the OSRS community does not care about rs3 then they should not be allowed to vote for changes for rs3... like what?
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u/TheBroboat Mar 11 '26
Did you want to keep MTX?
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u/TheBroboat Mar 11 '26
Vastly diminished no?
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u/ForgotMyLastUN Mar 11 '26
No?
It's still there? Literally just the gambling portion of it is gone?
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u/Chandler15 Mar 12 '26
To be fair, losing the gambling part is likely a significant downsize in profit.
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u/Skyline2969 Mar 11 '26
Without osrs support rs3 would be getting worse and worse literally osrs got together to help vote and make things better for runescape 3 when you all begged for osrs support on voting and now you moan about osrs players for helping that you lot begged for?
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u/Paradoxjjw Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
The OSRS community doesn’t care about RS3.
If only. They can't go a day without circlejerking over how bad they think RS3 is while saying things that make it 200% clear they've never touched RS3 in their lives. They constantly display a superiority complex that's frankly therapy worthy.
That, or they're bitching that they got exactly what they voted for. The bank UI was updated on OSRS recently and their sub was full of people complaining that "They didn't vote for this", the bank UI changes passed with >90% yes last year and it was pixel for pixel the thing they voted for.
They also spend a lot of time brigading this sub
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u/Bakugo_Dies Mar 11 '26
When precisely was RS3 subsidizing OSRS? I keep hearing people say this but no period of OSRS's history makes it seem like the case. The members OSRS drew in its first few months more than paid for the skeleton crew they had for the first few years.
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
At the start of OSRS when player count dropped due to no new content.
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u/Bakugo_Dies Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
A couple employees and server costs. After the game had competitive player count to RS3 for a couple months.
Such subsidization, wow.
Edit: to be clear, those server costs are negligible. People have been hosting private servers of that ancient game out of their basement as a substitute since the mid 2000s.
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u/rmtmjrppnj78hfh Mar 12 '26
the team was also like 3 dudes that were literally put in a corner within jagex hq
you'd have to dig through the early financial reports and see to know for sure (if those ones were ever released)
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
Servers still cost money even if there were only 3 devs and upper management, anti-cheat team, and customer support still needs to get paid. OSRS couldn't take 50% of that cost that early until they attract new players with new content.
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u/MobyLiick Mar 11 '26
You do know without OSRS players your vote to get rid of MTX doesn't pass right?
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u/flamingfungi 5.8 - 48/69 Boss Pets Mar 11 '26
You do know the vote was a nothing more than a stunt to drum up interest and there was never any way it wasn't going to pass, right?
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u/Legal_Evil Mar 12 '26
You mean the same vote system to vote in OSRS that RS3 players helped to pass?
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u/ForumDragonrs Completionist Mar 11 '26
Then that's what the RS3 player base wanted? I don't understand what you're trying to say here.
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u/MobyLiick Mar 11 '26
Well no, because you don't even have the playerbase to hit the 100k goal.
What I'm saying is this entire post is weird considering we helped you get what you wanted and it's now being thrown back in our face as if we did something wrong.
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u/iamnota_SHADOW Flair Mar 12 '26
It's insane the amount of toxicity they have towards RS3 over there on their subreddit. Why can't we all just get along?
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u/Chandler15 Mar 12 '26
I’m gonna be honest, most of the time on the main OSRS sub, 2007scape, RS3 is hardly mentioned. At times like these, yes, it’s talked about, which is understandable. But let’s also be real, there is a significant amount of toxicity to OSRS over here too.
I’m not gonna be the one to argue who cast the first stone, but it’s unfair to just say the amount of toxicity over there is insane, when there’s very blatant cases over here too. We had RS3 players asking for help in the TH removal poll over in 2007scape subreddit, then we had people over here complaining that the OSRS side helped those people that asked.
98% of the time RS3 is mentioned in no capacity over on that sub. There’s primarily posts about memes, accomplishments, suggestions, then complaints about updates. It’s just when things like these happen. After the TH removal poll passed, I remember this subreddit was fuming about it, and a lot of it came with bashing the OSRS playerbase for voting.
So I could say it’s insane the amount of toxicity towards OSRS over here, but wouldn’t you say that 98% of the time, OSRS isn’t mentioned over here? It just takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch.
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u/Rattiom32 Mar 11 '26
Is this sub just entirely bitching about OSRS?
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u/SevenSexyCats Master of Tainted Comp Mar 11 '26
No but you could say the same in reverse about r/osrs. Probably even more accurate
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u/Frekavichk eyyy Mar 11 '26
Sorry, can you link the main osrs sub, again? Your link just brings me to some random dead sub.
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u/SevenSexyCats Master of Tainted Comp Mar 11 '26
My bad, based on the posts it looks like I accidentally linked the rs3 subreddit…
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u/iBscs Mar 13 '26
I'm not making a new account to try rs3, you can let me use my semi level rs2 account but if I'm gunna try rs3, I wanna afk train my osrs account so I don't feel like I'm wasting time on the version of the game that isn't my main game. XP waste.
Let us multi-log, and c'mon, does it hurt to offer a package deal for a main and iron membership
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u/Big_Chungussi69 Mar 11 '26
osrs was never subsidized by rs3, what are you smoking lmao
they have 10x the player count on average
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u/frou6 Mar 11 '26
osrs was never subsidized by rs3
It was probably true for the first few years of osrs when you had peak player count at <15k player
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u/Big_Chungussi69 Mar 11 '26
osrs also only had a team of like 5 dudes at that time, so probably still not even then
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u/iAXottz Mar 11 '26
Even just a few years ago. The MTX revenue was the largest chunk of jagex’s revenue as a whole
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u/rmtmjrppnj78hfh Mar 12 '26
do you not know what the word subsidized means?
also if you've actually looked at financial statements, why ignore the total profit per game?
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u/Big_Chungussi69 Mar 11 '26
it wasnt, you can clarify that by just looking at financial statements. why u lieing
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u/Benny303 Mar 11 '26
I'm all for a membership cost increase as I totally understand jagex needs to be able to pay for the loss of MTX somehow. But This whole one character per membership cost thing needs to go.
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u/Chandler15 Mar 12 '26
Yeah, that’s the big thing. Not getting the multiple characters per membership is really awful, especially when they offer alternative game modes, like Ironman/Group Ironman.
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u/G2Keen Mar 12 '26
I just need to features for the cost. I feel like the average person uses 1 account, or they use bonds and do a few. If I could have multiple for one cost I wouldn't complain since I could just go hop over whenever.
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u/McLovinYou27 Mar 12 '26
I wouldn't mind paying more if they had a REAL customer support team.... that's the only thing that kinda bugs me cuz not me necessarily but soo many others it takes a long time to get things checked out... I can't think of anything else that cost this much without some kinda customer support? Not a huge deal to ask for... I appreciate EVERYTHING the Jmods do for us on osrs but that feels like the one lacking area for me :/ I know it's not a HUGE increase but when you're disabled and the government says f you we won't let you work even with a liability waiver.... to sum it up I get less than a thousand bucks a month to live on so after all my bills are payed I'm basically screwed... sometimes it's hard towards the end of the month tryin to get extra food! Not everybody can afford the increase AGAIN with the last one not being that long ago?... I'll stop complaining when we get customer support .. I'd rather get customer support before a new raids but hey I'm not a raider lmao 😆 cheers
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u/Badmann Ironman Mar 12 '26
The game has absolutely no customer support outside of support for content creators in their special discord.
I got hit with a false 2 day ban with no evidence and appealed immediately, only to get an AI generated generic response 2 days later, after the ban had been lifted, saying it was declined. Reached out again for my second attempt only to receive the same auto generated response and you can only appeal twice
Absolute shit show
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u/Ill-Calligrapher8282 Mar 12 '26
Would it be uncouth to go buy RS: Dragonwilds right now? Serious inquiry.
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u/Great_Minds Implement bad luck mitigation Mar 12 '26
Just do it. It's a good game. Can easily sink 50h Into it.
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u/Ill-Calligrapher8282 Mar 12 '26
Is it any good solo or would you recommend a group?
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u/Great_Minds Implement bad luck mitigation Mar 13 '26
I've played it with my oldest son (6), but it scales so probably a worse experience than it could have been.
I'd say go solo. You can transfer your character to different servers if you eventually do find a team or make a new one and start over.
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u/k--Gonzo Mar 11 '26
It wouldn't be so bad if you could be logged into both at once.