Free Realms is "insipid" - Jagex

By Robert Purchese Published 15 July, 2010

No "joie de vivre", says RuneScape boss.

Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard has called Sony's free-to-play MMO Free Realms "insipid".

"I'm probably going to upset people from Sony," he said during his Develop speech in Brighton this afternoon. "There was a short period when Free Realms was slated to launch that we went, 'Ooh, ah, this could be scary for us.' And scary because in 2005, Sony nearly invested in our business. Instead, John Smedley said, 'I can do this myself.'"

"That was the thing that worried us the most, because we felt they'd looked up our proverbial skirt: they knew the business model, develop plan, everything - inside out. And with the mighty budget of Sony we would have some serious competition.

"The thing that saved us was that Free Realms was perfectly designed by committee. It was 100 per cent micro-transactions, 100 per cent subscriptions, 100 per cent male, 100 per cent female. As a result, it was neither fish nor fowl; it didn't resonate with anyone, didn't have any identity.

"It was, I guess, largely insipid," he added. "Gorgeous graphics and everything else, but it didn't have have the joie de vivre."

In trying for everybody but catering for nobody, Free Realms sauntered past 10 million registered users in just one year. Even Sony's John Smedley - the man who turned down Jagex - was "pleasantly surprised" by its commercial performance.

Nevertheless, in RuneScape, Jagex owns what the Guinness Book of Records calls the world's most popular free MMO, with over 140 million registered users counted so far. Gerhard considers RuneScape second only to World of Warcraft.

Jagex this week announced its new MMO Stellar Dawn, a science fiction game risen from the ashes of canned project MechScape.

Look out for Eurogamer's full interview with an unrestrained Mark Gerhard soon.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Mox #1 2 years ago

    I like this new era of frank and open declarations between videogaming professionals. Next up, Molyneux declares Minter to be a "scary hippie" - Minter flattered.

  • MrChuckles #2 2 years ago

    Bring back fatbabies, then you'll have the whole industry slaging each other off just like the old days :)...

  • Tyronne #3 2 years ago

    I think there should be a industry `thunderdome` where any developers with a grievance with each other can enter and fight it out.

    and then release the home version for the 360 with kinect playability or the ps3 with move.

  • Zaiz #4 2 years ago

    I honestly have no clue why we haven't seen MMO producers ranting about how Guild Wars 2 won't work. They rant about everything else after all.

  • toy_brain #5 2 years ago

    Apparently Happy Farm is the most popular MMO with 228 million players. Though that's an MMOG and not an MMORPG so maybe they think it doesn't count.

    Still, you then have Dungeon Fighter with 200 million players, and that is more on an RPG - though it does have rather unique gameplay mechanics for the genre (plays like Streets of Rage / Final Fight).

    Either way, more than the 140 mil signed up to Runescape.
    Sorry, just had a very strong urge to be a pedant there. I'll stop now.

    Though for what its worth, I do agree with him about Free Realms. It is utterly bland. Its also become a bit of a ghost town lately. Regardless of how many have signed up, very few were still playing last time I checked.

  • DFawkes #6 2 years ago

    I still play Free Realms quite a bit, it's a charming little game with plenty to do that keeps getting lovely expansions.

    However, the corporate hand is forever taking everything free, which has lead to the quieter servers. I remember once I logged out in the middle of some mining a common ore. I logged back in later that same day, to be told "This is for subscribers only!" I still like the game, but you really need a subscription to do the really good stuff now.

  • makeamazing #7 2 years ago

    I dont like this "lets say something negative" to get press type of situation. My kids play runescape now and again, and from what ive seen, its not perfect by any means (yes it has lots of registered users), but what happened to a bit of industry respect.

  • maverick0182 #8 2 years ago

    I find it interesting that they like to go on about having '140 million subscribers' when what they actually have is 140 million accounts active. That is by no means the same as having 140 million people playing it. With Runescape you can only have one character to each account, whereas just about every other mmorpg allows you to have several characters on the same account. This skews the figures slightly when they wish to compare their user base to another mmorpg as we all know that each of the people playing that game is more than likely to have two, maybe even three or four accounts to allow them to have as many characters within the game. I also know for a fact that they include their staff accounts within those figures.

    As for the game being free, I noticed that someone said that Free Realms has locked out a lot of it's features to be subscriber only. The last time I checked, Runescape also has an awful lot of the content in it's 'free' game locked out to force their users to subscribe. The 'free' game really is nothing more than a glorified demo and I really wish that the people at Jagex would remember these facts when they start having digs at other people and companies in the industry.

    By the way, I am saying this from the point of view of somebody who works in the industry but does not have connections with either Sony or Jagex. I'm simply fed up of all of this point scoring that seems to be the rage in that company these days.

  • Kami #9 2 years ago

    I agree here, and it's the same in most "free-to-play" games. The real truth of the matter is that none of them are free, not do I buy into this new term of "Freemium". I use the same argument for MMOs and online gaming as I do for piracy of all sorts - if it's worth playing, it's worth paying. If not, just let it go. Plenty more fish in the sea.

    However, as much as I admire the Alanis Morisette-levels of irony at work here, he is right that Free Realms is a bit boring all told. It's a great concept, but as said, lacks a hook and a soul. That's the sort of thing that can be worked on (though with SOE's track record I certainly wouldn't put money on it!) and be made to work as long as the basic framework is there. Like a living thing, it can grow up and become more complex as time goes on.

    Still, I'm no believer in free-to-play games. They're either so basic you could go to the majority of flash game compilation sites and have a better time, or they're so restricted that you can't really do anything unless you're willing to dip your hand into your pocket - which defeats the point of a free-to-play game, no? It's a bit of a con all told, one that many of us can see but an equal number get suckered into and pay through the nose for content that isn't really worth the asking price...

    Isn't it ironic, don'tcha think?

  • Harmonica #10 2 years ago

    And yet none of these games will be more than footnotes in the pantheons of gaming history in decades from now. Trite pointless timewasters that cost too much and line the coffers of those who don't have enough talent or motivation to do anything properly artistic.

    Yawn.

  • BAM! #11 2 years ago

    Eurogamer you can do so much better than this constant reporting of developer tittle tattle. Leave this kind of thing to the shitty blogs please. Try to be like The Guardian rather than The Star.

  • drumbaby #12 2 years ago

    You should have asked Jagex to say 'Prick' a bit more.

  • iamian #13 2 years ago

    Yeah Eurogamer - stop reporting on what Developers say at the Develop Conference.