Jagex’s free-to-play browser MMOG RuneScape is pretty big. In fact, it’s the world’s biggest free game, says Guinness World Records, with over 105 million user accounts – dwarfing even mighty WoW almost tenfold.
NCSoft’s Aion has four million players in Asia right now? Pfft. WoW has twelve million worldwide? Chump change! These games that many of us hold up as kingpins of the MMOG space are relatively puny compared to the most popular free-to-play games. Take RuneScape, for example – according to Jagex’s Mark Gerhard, not only is the game recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s most popular free-to-play game, its numbers aren’t anything to sneeze about: 105 million players have signed up for the game over the course of its lifetime.
That’s a staggering amount, really. That’s three times the amount of people who’ve bought an Xbox 360. Only slightly less than twice the number of Wiis out there. Of course, not all of those accounts are active – many people make one and then never play after a while – but a good chunk of that 105-million-strong playerbase does come back regularly:
“More than 10 million. It depends if you’re taking a day, a week, three months. We did another stat for the Guinness Book of World Records that was total active unique [users] over time, and that was just over 105 million. So 105 million people have touched it,” Gerhard told Eurogamer.
Jagex is looking to capitalize on RuneScape‘s success with sci-fi Browser MMOG MechScape – which is still under wraps, but it has “Mech” in the game. That means it must be awesome.
