The Jagex Factor

It will have an, er, accumulation mechanic.

The game meta-view, story, concept remain the same. We still loved the story, it was just the implementation.

Ooh. [Cringes, giggles.]

Stellar Dawn will certainly be older than RuneScape, and play to a more core gamer audience. It'll still be casual, it'll still be accessible to most people.

The same people playing World of Warcraft, I suspect.

Indeed. We'll park our tanks on their lawn.

Our current business plan is another 10 years of slated game updates and content updates.

That will be much like we've done so far: iterative. The engine team's always pushing the tech and as soon as we're ready there will be another upgrade. But people don't need to pay for that, it just comes when it's ready.

A lot of what we've done to push the boundary for Stellar Dawn will benefit RuneScape and another MMO we're working on. We've got the advantage in that we share the same MMO tech platform. From there it's really down to the studios to decide how it's used.

We do, we totally do. We're working on it as we speak.

Well, "publisher" is a dirty word, or certainly the publishers today have made it a dirty word. We don't want comparisons to that. We know there's a lot of people like Jagex - indies who actually have great content - who don't know how to come to market. We really want to help those people. That goes beyond just the usual publishing relationship. It's really about passing on our 10 years of hard-learned lessons on every level: game design, content, story-arc, various other parts.

Even with War of Legends we spent a good six months and longer working on the game to localise it. That's not something we'll charge at a premium: that's us setting up a long-term investment. It's worth our effort to teach you all the things we know because you'll be making even better games in five years from now, and hopefully we'll still be your publisher of choice.

It's really hard to know. We didn't know RuneScape would be as big as RuneScape.