Jagex

Jagex Ltd. (also known as Jagex Software) is a United Kingdom-based producer of Java-based online video games, whose name is a contracted form of Java Gaming Experts or Java Games Experts. The company name is pronounced [ˈdʒæɡɛks]~-start-7-stop, as spoken by former CEO Geoff Iddison in August 2008. The company is best-known for its MMORPG RuneScape.

Jagex is a well-received company, ranking 59th on the Sunday Times' 100 Best Companies to Work For list for 2007, having been unranked for 2006. However, this slipped to number 87 for 2008.

History


The name Jagex Software has been in use since at least 1999, and was originally described as a "small software company based in England [who] specialise in producing top-quality Java-games for webpages".

According to Companies House, Meaujo (492) Limited was incorporated on 28 April 2000, and changed its name to Jagex Limited on 27 June 2000. The Jagex website states that the company was founded in December 2001 by Andrew Gower, Paul Gower, and Constant Tedder. The aim of this company was to operate its MMORPG, RuneScape, which had been in development since 1999. By the time of the company's founding, one year after the release of the game, RuneScape already had over one million free accounts registered. The first tasks of the company were to create a version of the game with extra features that required a £3.20 ($5 USD) monthly fee, while still offering the free version, and to develop partnerships with advertisers. Both tasks were achieved, and the pay-to-play version of RuneScape was released on 27 February 2002, gaining 5,000 subscriptions in the first week making

RuneScape is one of the largest Java pay-to-play games in the world. On 4 May 2007, Jagex announced that RuneScape has over 9,000,000 free players and over 1,000,000 pay-to-play subscribers. In 2006, Andrew and Paul Gower were calculated to be worth £32 million. On "The Rich List 2007", Andrew and Paul are under claims to be worth £106 million ($190 million USD). Andrew Gower is also known for his varieties of Java games. Jagex also received an investment from Insight Venture Partners in October 2005. The company had been self-funded before this investment. RuneScape has since been translated into German and French. Jagex was ranked 59th on the list of The Best 100 Companies to work for by the Sunday Times. In 2009 Jagex was short listed for the UK Developer of The Year award at the Golden Joystick Awards

Jagex co-creator Andrew Gower still works with Jagex workers every day, and you can see Jagex on the 'Jagex cam', from the Jagex offices.

Future development


Jagex have stated on their website that they "intend to become a significant online operator in all the major gaming markets worldwide" by developing new games using their own technologies."

There have been many rumours of Jagex's next big release, and Jagex has confirmed that it will be releasing a new MMOG called MechScape. This game, which will be released in Q1 of 2009, will be called MechScape. It will be a futuristic MMOG that will break away from RuneScape's homely roots but will still be browser based. The game will be aimed at a higher age range and will be slightly or wholly sci-fi. It was officially confirmed by Jagex at the gaming event E3 on 15 July 2008.

Operation
Jagex has grown since the founding of the company in 2001. They currently have offices in Cambridge and London. The company had been recruiting heavily in 2006 and has over 300 employees, grouped into the Development, Publishing, Web Content, Minigame, and Customer Relations teams.

They maintain about 161 servers for RuneScape in various locations around the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom. Some of the more recent additions to the servers include the addition of the German and French servers. These are currently the only servers for non-English versions of the game thus far, but Jagex has confirmed that more languages are planned.

Beyond RuneScape
While most of the work by Jagex staff now deals with RuneScape, they still maintain one game which can be played on their corporate website and many games that can be played in FunOrb.

Games

 * Vertigo (A new version Entitled Vertigo 2 has been released on FunOrb )

FunOrb
In February 2008, Jagex announced that they would be releasing a casual browser-based gaming site called FunOrb within the month. FunOrb was released on 27 February 2008. It uses the same account information as RuneScape, but requires a separate membership.

The site hosts small games varying in amount of possible playtime from an hour to two days. 40% of the website is available for free while the other 60% is available to persons who pay the membership fee. Jagex offers a discount for those who are paying members of both RuneScape and FunOrb.

It was originally released with 17 games, and in keeping with their promise of an update every two weeks, it now has a total of 36.

The most popular game on the site is the turn-based multiplayer game Arcanists, in which the player takes on the role of an aspiring wizard who battles against his or her rivals in destructible arenas.

Jagex has used almost exclusively the popularity of RuneScape to gain patrons for this site, with almost all FunOrb players being either current or former RuneScape players.

Recently, Jagex released a new free to play multiplayer game called Armies of Gielinor. This is the game that is set in the RuneScape universe they promised to release. You can summon beasts such as Black Knights, greater Demons, Aviansies, and other monsters from the RuneScape universe.

YouTube channel
Also in early 2008, Jagex created their own YouTube channel, called "thejagexchannel", which is "The official YouTube channel for Jagex Ltd, producers of quality online games based on Java technology."

Jagex has verified the authenticity of the channel, and has stated that it is permissible for RuneScape players to discuss openly the videos on the channel. This is an exception to their general policy, which is that discussion of specific YouTube videos in-game is prohibited.

The channel currently contains ten videos. The first seven videos are previews of FunOrb games. The last two videos are about the July 2008 major graphics update.

Back in 2006, a player had made a YouTube channel and titled it "jagex", though currently disclaims to actually be Jagex. Probably for this reason, Jagex the company named their channel "thejagexchannel".

Jagex also has a twitter account called Official Jagex, a Facebook, and a LiveJournal called "TheJagexLJ".

An interesting fact is that the only channel which they subscribed to was the channel of HS Zezima, however the channel unsubscribed recently due to unknown reasons.

It has been noted by Mark Gerhard that he will be using the Jagex YouTube page more and will be interacting more with RuneScape players on YouTube.

MechScape


Rumoured during parts of 2007 and throughout 2008, MechScape is Jagex's new MMORPG, due for release in the first quarter of 2009.

Official Thread Discussing MechScape Note that thread no longer exsists

DeviousMUD
In 1999 Jagex created a game called "DeviousMUD". It is now called RuneScape. This name stopped in 2001, with their first RuneScape News in 2002. The first RuneScape news was one of the most viewed news now. Many people have wanted to date back and see what it was like. RuneScape Classic is for members only and that is what it was like when DeviousMUD was out, but it was never opened to the public.