A long time ago, before I was in Newspaper Staff, I looked at Jagex’s arcade. It was made up of simple little arcade games, like the kind you could find on Miniclip or *insert other random game site here*. Now, if you head down to their corporate website, you can find those games. RuneScape is at the top, and is advertised as being, “Our biggest and best game by far!”.

Without RuneScape, would Jagex be one of those little game sites that nobody visits? Would it be doomed to forever sitting in the Internet, unheard and unspoken of? I believe, personally, if Jagex had not invented RuneScape, who knows if they’d ever even be in business at the moment. They used to have a few fun little things to do, but you could find the same sort of thing on the bigger game sites that have much more popularity.

RuneScape was basically the company’s “big break”, in fact I bet a tiny fraction of the people who play or once played RuneScape knew about Jagex before they began to play.

Let’s assume RuneScape crashed. A huge crash, that would take years to rebuild RuneScape. Do you think that people would stumble upon Jagex? The players would of course remember it as the company that made RuneScape. What about others, however? Would Jagex be laying undiscovered?

In the cases of other game makers such as GPotato or Ijji, multiple games can attract other players. Jagex only attracts those people interested in playing a medieval Java game, where if you want to play anything from Gunz to GunBound, Ijji gets players of different interests. If one of their games were to crash for years, they could work on it but still have a company because of the other games. RuneScape is still massively popular; but simply imagine if Jagex decided to create a first person shooter, for example. If Joe plays the first person shooter, he comes in contact with the name Jagex. The reason I started to play some other games by sites is because I discovered a different game. If RuneScape were to go down, who knows what Jagex would do.

To some players, Jagex is a one-hit wonder. Nothing else they made really took off. But if RuneScape never existed, think of the millions of dollars Jagex makes by members in RuneScape. It pays for servers, jobs, and other things. Without RuneScape, I have a feeling Jagex would not be a name that popped in people’s minds when they thought the word “online game company”.