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I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
by percentcer 16d ago
I don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- pton_xd 16d agoIt's free and you could play it in the school library, for one. Also it came out a few years before WoW.
- VertanaNinjai 16d agoIt was free to play when that wasn’t a popular financial model for games at the time. The memberships were also much cheaper than WoW and accepted different payment methods that would be more available to minors at the time.
- junon 16d agoAlso no need to install or commit to a guild or clan or whatever. You could just log in, screw around for an hour or ten, and log off. Then log in again from somewhere else. It was miraculous for a kid like me.
- connicpu 16d agoCould even run on the computers at my middle school, nobody thought to block it
- thothless 16d agoin addition to what others said... 2004 runescape, now "old school runescape", which is actually successor 2001 Runescape "Classic", were both playable in a browser. and my (parent's) PC couldn't even install, let alone run WoW. despite me trying with all my might. so I'm sure I wasn't alone. it was absolutely magical to me.
- terribleperson 16d agoYep. You could play it almost anywhere. School, friends house, parents work laptop. It required little hardware and, as you said, ran in a browser. Meanwhile, WoW had to be installed, took a fairly large amount of space (I remember 14gb on my 28gb HDD), and Ironforge ran like garbage on my PC.
- rcxdude 16d agoYeah, it predated WoW by some years, and was accessible pretty much anywhere (even if school IT often tried to block it).
- cyphar 16d agoAs a kid, I didn't have a computer that could run WoW, nor would I have been able to convince my parents to pay for the subscription. I suspect most of the popularity was from kids in a similar situation, probably playing it on library computers when they should've been studying. MapleStory was also quite popular back then for similar reasons.
- terribleperson 16d agoBesides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.
- hansvm 16d agoThe other comments hit the big ones (didn't have to download, had a free tier, didn't have significant irreversible character choices, had meaningful solo or quasi-social activities, etc), but I think a major contributing factor was it appearing on miniclip.
- AlwaysRock 16d agoOthers have said it but free to play option and it ran in browser. I had no money and knew WoW was more popular but my low end pc couldn’t run WoW very well and I couldn’t afford the $15 a month subscription. I think I did end up paying for a RuneScape membership but even then it was only $5 a month.
- snovymgodym 16d agoThey were two very different games and target audiences, with the incidental commonality that both are MMOs.
- tibiamuch 16d ago[dead]
- s5300 16d ago[dead]
- andrepd 16d agoWoW needed a purchase, an expensive subscription, and a good PC. Runescape ran on a potato, was F2P, the P2P was 5$ a month, and you could get started in 2 minutes from Miniclip.
- opan 16d agoRuneScape was very popular at my local public library, and as a kid I only played the F2P content. I knew maybe one or two people around that time that played WoW. The paid subscription made it not a realistic option for me at the time. Though one of those WoW players did once bring his discs over for me to install the game and play on a private server with him. I don't think I kept playing WoW long for whatever reason. I was more into MapleStory, Graal Online, and RuneScape.
- robrtsql 16d agoI think WoW was PC-only with an Intel Mac release coming later. Runescape was one of the few MMOs I could run on my parent's PowerPC Mac.