SRL Archive - News and General

Forund this article in the times online http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article3285256.ece

The part that I really noticed was when they started talking about real life trading

Game designers wanted to ban so-called real world trading, but they grappled to find a mechanism to stop it. “What we realised is that we had to stop unequal trading in the game; where suddenly somebody would turn up with a million gold,” Mr Jele says, and so the company introduced a range of restrictions, for which the launch of a “stock market” was crucial. Now only people can trade items of similar value - and for the moment, real world trading is in abeyance. The price of a million gold shot up to $20 to $25 - and the clean-up cost RuneScape 60,000 subscribers.

If that figure is accurate rather than the figures in the hundreds of thousands that some people seemed to be picking out of the air then jagex would appear to have done not too badly

60k users, $300k USD/month. quite a loss.

From: The Claw
60k users, $300k USD/month. quite a loss.

£150k ($300k) is only 6% of their income from membership which would be about £2.5 million ($5 million) as they will still be about the one million members mark, add to that the income from advertising on the free game and I think most companies would see that as an acceptable one time loss.

Don't also forget that some of that number will be the Chinese gold farmers who they wanted to get rid of anyway

Still, the paying players ensure that RuneScape is highly profitable. Accounts for 2006, the latest available, show Jagex making pre-tax profits of £10.2 million on sales of £16.8 million (a margin of 60 per cent). Geoff Iddison, the chief executive of the 400-employee company, says that “revenue and profits are growing at 35per cent”, making it worth well over £100 million.

£100 million = $200 million usd. I doubt anyone thinking about hacking rs will get away with it, when Jagex is so rich now. But it does make us prety cool to pwn jagex by autoing. Maybe since Jagex is getting in Yahoo! home page and Times online, we can get in there for autoing them :D (yea right).

Woath that's a serious amount of cash, and i never knew that runescape was getting paid by with stolen credit cards o.O

Remember the article says 60,000 subscribers lost, not members lost.

Also assuming that subscribers in this sense means members how many of the 60,000 lost subscribers paid legitimatly? When they first made the changes one of there comments was that the majority of the trader accounts were paid for fraudulently. This generates an extra cost for Jagex because they would get a chargeback every time a fraudulent transaction was detected and that is a cost not just a simple refund.

on a side note. 10 million Pre-Tax profit does not mean profit. and 10Mill aint exactly a huge amount for a company that has 400 employees.

I didn't know that runescape can get that popular to get on the times. And espacially if it was just about trying to stop the real world trading.

Why should runescape ban real-world trading?
I think these trades are fair.

don't forget the price they get in advertising, and it's alot they probably grab about 3-5 usd per 1k impressions and that's about 40k non members on all day and ads rotate about every ten mins so it's about $720 per hour off free to play advertising….

From: Keith102030
Why should runescape ban real-world trading?
I think these trades are fair.

Because people are making money off of their work (meaning Runescape, not the time spent gathering the gold/items/etc). They still technically own everything on their servers, which includes gold and accounts.