Comment on AAA Dominance Is Eroding: 56% of PC Gaming Revenue Now Goes to Games Outside the Top 20
mika_mika@lemmy.world 1 day agoRunescape also was a free game at a time when those weren’t really common. I honestly can’t think of any others with the scope of RS.
Not only was it free, it ran entirely in a browser window.
That’s how it managed to build its player base, and it coasts on that nostalgia to this day.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
There were loads of free browser games back then
mika_mika@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Miniclip, Newgrounds, and similar felt more like mini games.
For free and in browser with some actual progression, I can think of RuneScape and those Artix Adventure Quest series games. I played both, but Runescape definitely felt like more of a complete game with 3D models and all.
God, I had forgotten how bad those Artix games were til I remembered them just now.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 6 hours ago
I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.
Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.
There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)
mika_mika@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Vintage gaming?? Runescape??
I played during the height of it’s Runescape 2 popularity in middle school and I don’t think I’m that antique yet. 😭 Minecraft released while I was a high schooler playing alpha and the kids still like it!! I’m not old!
RuneScape’s age shows more I think because it was entirely playable in a browser window (which came with its limitations). Aside from having a hefty chunk of free content, this is what I credit its success to.
My poor self was happy to be playing anything on the, even at the time, old family PC. A choppy fps low polygon RPG on a java game, because that’s all I could afford, was quite swell after school with my friends online. Anyone could just pull it up on theirs, no DL.
It was accessible and didn’t require a lot of machine power. It’s got a player base today not because it’s a fantastic game, but because there’s a lot of people who are nostalgic for it.