Jagex Talks War Of Legends

20 Jan 2010 at 12:12:15 by Tim McDonald

Jagex's third party-developed browser-based free-to-play online RTS, War of Legends, has just gone live, and this seemed an opportune moment for Tim McDonald to sit down with Jagex's head of communications Adam Tuckwell and War of Legends product manager Christian Reshoeft to talk about the hows and whys of it all, with questions varying from why War of Legends to the specifics of how play rolls out.

Hello, guys! To start with, can you give us a bit of background info on Jagex and War of Legends?

Adam Tuckwell (right): War of Legends is the first time that we're starting to publish someone else's games, so we're moving into third-party publishing. We've got a couple of motivations behind that. When we started back in 2001, we were a publisher by default because no-one really understood the online gamespace when we started out, and arguably, people still don't. The traditional publishers still don't have a really good grasp of the online gaming space, especially when it comes to publishing free-to-play titles, so we've sort of established a niche for ourselves by being one of the world leaders in online free-to-play browser games publishing.

We've done that in a slightly unusual way by not focusing on PR or marketing significantly – we've grown our audience and userbase purely by word of mouth spreading around by our users telling other people about our games. That's quite significant, and it's allowed us to amass an extremely large audience. Since 2001, I think we've had about 165 million people create accounts for Runescape or for our other titles, so we've got a real global audience. We're looking now to help support third-party developers to bring games to market, as long as they fit with our plans and ambitions for what we do, and the requirements we have for our games. War of Legends is a perfect example: it's a browser game and it's free-to-play, which fits with our current games titles, but it also offers our users something slightly different.

We have a number of different users who play our games and we think that War of Legends will stand out as an RTS which is different from our current catalogue with one exception – Armies of Gielinor on FunOrb.com. It's also aimed at a slightly older age group, as well; it's sort of aimed at a different generation so you're talking 20, 30, 40 year olds, really. It's something that's a little bit different, but it shares our values and ethos, which is one of the reasons why we selected to work with the partner.

We're also moving to be a developer's publisher – we're not the sort of company that just wants to pack and ship other people's titles and then leave it to see how it does; we're very committed to actually helping the developer make the game the best that it possibly is, and we'll be pretty much helping to run the game all the way through and maybe work with them on future titles as well. So there's a lot of interesting stuff around the move to War of Legends, and it's a big move for us, becoming a third-party publisher – but for us it seems like quite a natural one. We've got a big audience of people who are calling out for the sort of games that we create, and we see it as an unmissable opportunity for us.

Do you think that this is going to expand your userbase significantly, then? I presume you're aiming at a completely different demographic to Runescape.

AT: Good question. The Runescape demographic is a very difficult one to categorise. Obviously it's very popular amongst teenagers and young people and young adults, but we do have a really wide demographic; we have quite a lot of players in their 20s, 30s, and 40s as well. We do see this as a game that we're not going to push, necessarily, to our existing Runescape userbase, but we definitely think it will appeal to former Runescape players, as well as other people who play maybe our FunOrb catalogue, who are more interested in games based on more tactical or management styles of gameplay, and also people who might not have the same amount of time to commit to an MMO. With Runescape people spend a large amount of their time in game, whereas the novelty of War of Legends is that you're able to drop in and drop out, and do a few very tactical moves to either develop and build your empire, or build your armies so that you can go and attack someone else. You can then leave the world, step out, and let those moves take place. So we think it'll appeal to people who maybe have an hour or so a day where they can drop in, in maybe ten minute chunks, to be able to do things within the game. We're quite keen to see what will happen with it. We obviously believe confidently that it will be a successful game or we wouldn't be doing it, but we see this very much as the first of many.

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