How many people play Old School RuneScape? — 2024 statistics

Old School RuneScape has 38.80 million total players.

(Source: MMO Populations)

• Old School RuneScape is estimated to have around 1.8 million players per day.
• The yearly Old School RuneScape population increased by 82.5% from May 2022 to April 2023.
• RuneScape, on the other hand, has 17.69 million total players.
• The game has an estimated 336,000 average daily players.

The best way to gauge the popularity of a game is to look at how many players log in daily, as well as how many players it has in general. In the case of Old School RuneScape, the game has nearly 40 million total players. Of course, this is just an estimate since only official sources can display accurate numbers, but it is a good representation and a decent chunk of players that fall within the 260 million total player count for the series in general.

RuneScape has achieved over $1 billion in total revenue.

(Sources: PCGamesN, TweakTown)

• 2018 was the most profitable year ever for Jagex.
• 260 million players signed up for RuneScape since the first game came out.
• Jagex recorded revenue of $105 million for the 2018 fiscal year.
• That was a 14.2% increase compared to 2017.
• In 2019, RuneScape made $10 million per month.

There are very few completely free franchises, as they usually feature paid content in the way of cosmetics and additional content, and RuneScape is no different. The franchise has gathered over $1 billion in revenue since the first game came out, which is a tremendously high amount of money for any franchise to aim for. Assuming that Old School RuneScape continues to deliver the same level of content and rise in popularity, we are sure that this number will increase as well.

An Old School RuneScape player earned over $120,000 through a money exploit.

(Sources: MMOs, Twitter)

• The bug was found by reversing the item imbuing process in the Soul Wars minigame.
• The imbuing process should have returned a proportionate amount of gold, equal to the cost of the item, but it ended up returning much more than that.
• The player ended up accumulating over 500 billion in gold, selling 400 billion for $120,000 in real life.

In-game exploits occur fairly often in the gaming world and this one was extremely lucrative for whoever cashed out after accumulating all of that gold. $120,000 is no small amount for anyone trying to make money off of a game, and we can be fairly certain that there are going to be very few bugs like this in the future.

A group of Old School RuneScape players claimed a 16 billion gold bounty.

(Source: MMORPG)

• A player and streamer named C Engineer had a 2-year Ironman run where he asked viewers to donate to a bounty pool.
• He challenged anyone to come and kill him to claim the bounty.
• In 2022, a player named Westham claimed the bounty with their group.
• This was the largest player bounty in Old School RuneScape history.

This was a very impressive feat for a certain group of Old School RuneScape players as they all went home as rich men. The bounty itself was a few years in the making and it was a massive event for the game when it was claimed. The manner in which the game was collected was also quite creative as it involved many members of the community pitching in and donating small amounts of gold to the pool.

Old School RuneScape has over 8 million downloads on mobile.

(Sources: Pocket Gamer, MobileGamer)

• The game launched in October 2018 and won the BAFTA Mobile Game of the Year award.
• The RuneScape franchise achieved its highest player membership peak in 2019 at over 1.1 million subscribers.
• 40% of total RuneScape players are on mobile.

As you might have assumed, Old School RuneScape also has a mobile release which is quite popular as 40% of the total player base of the game belongs to mobile. It draws in millions of players each month and is doing extremely well on all fronts.

Old School RuneScape players completed 200,000 quests per day in 2019.

(Source: TweakTown)

• 25.1 million fish were caught per day.
• 198.2 million logs were chopped per day.
• 32.2 million weapons and armor were forged per day.
• 2.3 million bosses were slain.

These are just some miscellaneous numbers concerning the state of Old School RuneScape in 2019, and as you can see, the community of the game recorded some excellent stats, from bosses defeated to fish caught, RuneScape players did it all!

Old School RuneScape broke its own concurrent player count record in 2020 with 170,000 active players.

(Source: TechSpot)

• The game usually maintained between 60,000 and 90,000 concurrent players.
• The massive spike in players was attributed to the League II: Trailblazer event.
• This is especially impressive considering Old School RuneScape is just a reboot of the 2007 game.
• Leagues is members-only content and requires players to purchase one month of membership for $11.

The most important thing to keep in mind when considering these numbers is that the first RuneScape game was released in 2001 and the version of the game that Old School is based on was released in 2007. Imagine that, a 2007 game that has managed to captivate and keep its audience for so many years, even breaking its own concurrent player count record in 2020.

Old School RuneScape’s best Twitch year was 2020 with over 70 million hours watched.

(Source: SullyGnome)

• The game had 1.6 million broadcasting hours.
• It had 8,000 viewers on average.
• There were 183 channels streaming the game on average.
• It had a viewer ratio of 43.7.
• Its max viewer count was 93,917.
• 43,211 broadcasters streamed the game.

Some of the best AAA games out there struggle to accumulate even a fraction of the hours watched that Old School RuneScape managed to accumulate in 2020. The game is popular because people enjoy playing it, but it is also popular because it’s a remarkably appealing game to watch. Even though it is quite grind-intensive, people just love to tune in and enjoy the content.

The RuneScape Classic servers were shut down after 17 years.

(Source: IGN)

• RuneScape classic was released in 2001.
• One of the main reasons for the shutdown was that the servers for the game were far too vulnerable to bots and macro programs.
• This sort of issue poses a great threat to the safety of the community.
• The developers of the game wanted to avoid the game from falling apart, so they pulled the plug before things got worse.
• This enabled them to focus more on adding content to their other games.

This is something that happens fairly often with very old games as their servers eventually become quite unstable and are prone to attacks and a myriad of issues from bots to macro commands. At some point, the cost of maintaining and fixing servers becomes overshadowed by the need to improve the content that developers push into their newer releases, so servers shutting down like this should not be a surprise.

The Old School RuneScape esports scene awarded $457,504 in prize pools.

(Source: Esports Earnings)

• The money was distributed across 26 tournaments.
• The Deadman Invitationals brought in the most money, with $32,000 per tournament.
• The rest of the tournaments had prize pools ranging from $28,500 to $1,000.
• The most successful Old School RuneScape player is Manked, who has won $68,500 from 6 tournaments.
• He is ranked #3662 in the world and #126 in the United Kingdom.

And finally, we have some statistics regarding Old School RuneScape’s esports scene, which has a relatively decent status as it has awarded nearly half a million dollars in prize pools across quite a few tournaments. Although the game has not seen as much success as other, bigger games have on the same scene, it is still impressive that it managed to accumulate such numbers despite its age.

To sum up

Okay, so that would conclude everything we have to say about the legendary Old School RuneScape! As you can see, this game has made large strides in the gaming community as a game that anyone can pick up and get immersed in for months, not even scratching the surface of everything it has to offer. The franchise itself has been around since 2001 and in that time, the RuneScape brand has grown exponentially, with all of its games being popular. We’re extremely glad to be able to display all of this information for someone to find and learn something new, so we hope that you can read this and have all of your questions answered about this fantastic game!