The UK’s largest independent games company, Jagex, has recently released it’s first third-party developed game, War of Legends. The new title finds a home right alongside Jagex’s 40+ free-to-play titles.
A real time strategy game based on Chinese myth, War of Legends presents players with a choice either to support their current less than scrupulous King, or shift their alliances to a righteous upstart vying for the throne. The game offers players the opportunity to rule empires, manage resources, and command massive armies which will inevitably be used to overtake opposing forces. All the while, players must also keep on eye on the homefront, and defend their cities against other players.
War of Legends (not to be confused with League of Legends) features an evolving storyline that will see a rollout of planned game updates, including new tasks and in-game items that are aimed at keeping players engaged. Notably, War of Legends features a persistent game play world, thereby allowing players’ armies to gain in strength and resources even while the player is not playing, resulting in a formidable army (after extended game play, and time away). Jagex is also encouraging player alliances (another method of engagement) which may then collaborate to tackle the legendary quest for eternal glory.
While this is Jagex’s first third party developed title, it’s also their first flash based title. As with all Jagex titles, the game requires no downloads, and is playable in-browser from just about any PC/Browser combination. The title will also feature Jagex’s first take on microtransactions via Jcredits. This move is not without precedent, as they displayed interest in the method a while back, but noted that implementing Jcredits into Runescape would not have been beneficial to the games’ economy. However, no official word has arrived from Jagex quite yet on the implementation.
“When we started to develop games in 2001 we were forced to self-publish as none of the ‘traditional publishers’ seemed interested in or even understood online game publishing. Nearly a decade and a great deal of success later, we want to leverage our experience and global reach to help other talented young developers bring their games to life” said Mark Gerhard, CEO at Jagex. “We were approached by the War of Legends development team last year, we played it and loved it, we believe our players would probably feel the same way so it’s only natural to add it to our growing catalogue of games on Jagex.com. We are actively recruiting to help scale up our publishing division throughout 2010 and we are confident that WarofLegends.com will be the first of many great third-party games to be published by Jagex.”
Combat Arms
In fairness, these numbers account for Runescape’s entire product runtime, some 9+ years. However, even if we’re looking at 9 years, that’s still on average 11.6 million users per year signing up. If that ‘somewhere around 12 million’ number is jumping out at you, yes, that’s the current estimate of active WoW players globally. And again, while this number is cumulative, 
