Another price hike. $14.99/month now, $131.88/year. That’s up from $12.49/month and $79.99/year before the Sept 2024 hike. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a 20% monthly increase and a 65% annual increase in about 18 months. They also killed the 6-month option. We now pay the same monthly as WoW. For one character. Mod North has said a lot of the right things since taking over. Killed Treasure Hunter after the community vote, promised no MTX in OSRS ever. Jagex called the $32.49/month survey a “misstep.” Fair enough. But these price hikes are probably not his call. They’re likely baked into the deal that put him there in the first place. Who actually owns Jagex Jagex has changed ownership four times since 2012. Here’s the chain: 2012: Insight Venture Partners takes majority stake (amount undisclosed, previously held ~35%) 2016: Fukong/Hongtou (~$300M) 2020: Macarthur Fortune ($530M) 2021: Carlyle Group ($530M+) 2024: CVC Capital Partners + Haveli Investments (~$1.1B) Every single one of these is a financial firm. Not a game publisher. Not a studio. The typical model is: buy a company, grow its numbers, sell it to the next buyer at a markup. The price nearly doubled from Carlyle to CVC in three years. Between leaving Jagex and coming back, Mod North was doing venture capital advisory and working at Huuuge Games, a mobile company he himself described as “very monetization oriented.” CVC put him on the Jagex board in 2024 before making him CEO in March 2025. He has to answer to people who spent a billion pounds and want their money back. How the buyout works Important: Jagex is private, so the actual debt terms aren’t public. The numbers below are estimates based on how leveraged buyouts typically work, not confirmed figures. When CVC and Haveli bought Jagex for ~£910M, they didn’t write a cheque for the full amount. That’s not how private equity works. In a typical LBO, the buyer puts up 40-50% in equity and borrows the rest. That debt gets loaded onto Jagex, not the buyer. Jagex is the one making the payments. If we assume typical LBO structure, that’s potentially £450-550M in debt on Jagex’s books. At current leveraged loan interest rates (roughly 7-9%), that could mean an estimated £35-45M per year in interest alone. Jagex’s EBITDA was estimated around £60M before the sale (per industry reporting at the time). If those debt estimates are even close, more than half of the company’s operating profit could be going to service debt from a deal the players had zero input on. Here’s a rough, estimated picture of where the total revenue (~£140-150M) likely goes: Staff (devs, QA, community, support, ~700 people): £50-60M Debt interest (estimated): £35-45M Servers and infra: £10-15M PE management fees and advisory: £5-10M Actual game reinvestment: whatever’s left Even if these estimates are off by a wide margin, the basic shape likely holds. A significant chunk of revenue is probably going somewhere other than the game. The Treasure Hunter thing is real but also convenient Credit where it’s due. The community voted to remove TH and Jagex followed through. That’s good. But MTX revenue was already in decline. It dropped 12% in 2023. Mod North said the old MTX approach was “harming RuneScape.” They were probably going to have to change it regardless. Framing the sub increase as the cost of removing TH looks like convenient PR. Based on the size of the price hikes vs what MTX was bringing in, it’s likely the new sub revenue more than covers the loss. We gave up MTX and got higher subs AND the debt is still there on top. The game is literally more popular than ever OSRS hit 240k concurrent players last summer. All-time record. The WoW exodus, Varlamore, Sailing hype. The game is in a golden age by any player count metric. More players means more subs means more revenue. Growth is supposed to make things cheaper or at least stable, not more expensive. If the game is growing AND prices are going up this aggressively, the extra money probably isn’t going into the game. The dev team hasn’t doubled in size, we haven’t suddenly gotten twice the content. What happens next The typical PE playbook is hold for 3-5 years, grow the numbers on paper, sell to the next firm for more than you paid. If that happens again, the next buyer likely loads on more debt. The cycle repeats. Each flip means more financial pressure, which probably means more pressure on us. Mod North has talked about building for “the next 10, 15, 25 years” of sustainable growth. PE firms typically don’t think in 25 year windows. They think in 3-5 year windows that end with an exit. Those two timelines don’t line up. submitted by /u/PossessionDangerous9
Originally posted by u/PossessionDangerous9 on r/2007scape