I'd be curious how many OSRS players had never played RuneScape prior to trying OSRS; definitely a few due to OSRS Gold the simple fact that it's become a bit of a cultural phenomenon/icon but it can't be many. I imagine interest in a 13 year really grind-heavy, mostly obsolete old MMORPG running on a 20 year old spaghetti powered engine isn't very high among younger viewers that didn't grow up playing RuneScape to start with. Some sort of RuneScape Remastered or enlarged MMO set in the RuneScape world could be RuneScape's only hope. You're absolutely right about Jagex handling of every other game they've ever produced, so I optimistic.

Look at player counts games like cod, or steam amounts. Runescape generally has 20kish players online. Thats 24/7, many games dream of numbers like that. Just the games that are complete have more players. Can it be less than it'd sure, is it close to death? Not even near it. If you produce a match you hope is has even a fraction of the players. Look at wolcenthey had like 75k players around the first day and they didn't even envision or prepare that many players so the servers took a shit. Today Runescape averages less than 2k gamers.

Such as they used to in the rpg and mmo facet of this marketplace, there are to many games now times to encourage huge numbers. Shooters that they come and go every year and always haveCS holds players. RS3 includes a solid 20-30k on pretty much at any given time. With upward of 45k at peaks. It would be somewhere in the mid to low 20's on steam graphs in rank, if we are comparing to steam charts. Which is really a good spot to be in contemplating that is where a lot of the more popular games place on steam graphs such as final dream and ESO.

My guess is that it's likely to be an entirely new and different MMO rather than remastering the very old code we play today, I do not think that they think that it's worth to remaster RuneScape in fear of it being ineffective and result in loss of gamers. Brand recognition is the best marketing tool there is, especially when it's one with the quantity of nostalgia which Runescape brings to so a lot of people. The rumours of RuneScape: Remastered are that it is a completely new game which shares some lore out of RuneScape, but could be set somewhat later in the timeline and have an entirely new world (possibly sharing a few of the same areas as the recent RuneScape, but rebuilt from the earth without the grid system and other constraints of the old engine).

So it essentially is a wholly new MMO, but they're using RuneScape more as a franchise than to refer to a certain game (or two matches, I figure ). It is probably only known as"RuneScape Remastered" for advertising purposes. There are a ton of those who played RuneScape at some point in their lives, but are following the news about Jagex anymore. If they release a game called"RuneScape Remastered" they will probably get much more grip online than if they would release a completely separate MMO with a completely different title.