Casting the Runes

A bit of bad journalism! I'm not referring to you, I'm referring to the Sunday Times [which originally broke the news]. I guess the first to make is this is very old news, this is 13 months ago, we announced it in January 2011, even the apparent news worthy filings discovered we actually made in February 2011 at Companies House. So this is truly after the event.

And I think you know, by and large, the point I want to make is really benign. Nothing has changed as far as the company goes. It's the same management team, we've obviously been at the helm for quite some time and to the best of our knowledge and expectation it will continue to be so. Sure we therefore have some American shareholders, but the management and the culture and the ethos and everything else is the same people, in the same hands, and staunchly British.

But at the same time we're not xenophobic and saying we're only going to hire British people. Obviously I think any successful company is going to be a cosmopolitan mix. But I guess I just keep reinforcing that I've been here going on five years, at the helm for a good few years of those, so as far as I'm concerned and as far as the rest of the team would be concerned life is no different day in and day out.

And maybe the analogy I think of is if you think of... would you say Rolls Royce is any less British now than it was a few years ago? When the truth is its majority shareholders are BMW. But I don't think we think of it... well I certainly don't, as a German company. I can pick any other almost British institution and that will be the case.

If we do want to put Britain back on the map for games development it takes success. And it takes success around the world. I'd say that comes from having investment.

I think any company that truly plans to compete on a global scale, with what are really giants in this space, to that extent we are small. It doesn't matter if we're 400 or 500 people, we're still a very small British company by comparison to the EAs and the Activisions, Nintendos, and the Sonys and Microsofts. But we have to compete with them head on, because we're looking for the same mind share, servicing, some of the same players and in order to do that it does take investment, investment beyond just what was Jagex's means. We're a successful company, we're very proud of what we've achieved to date. If we do want to put Britain back on the map for games development and everything else it takes success. And it takes success around the world in order to do that and again I'd say that comes from having investment from people as visionary as Insight and Spectrum and Raine.

I guess the initial reading of some of the press stuff you know almost slightly hurt, that we're reading this and going "wow", all our values, everything we do, everything we're trying to create is almost being positioned in a slightly nefarious way, and it couldn't be further from the truth. This is a really good thing, it's a really good thing for Jagex and for UK job creation and it's under Insight's investment that we continue to grow, continue to hire more people and increase the calibre of the talent we've brought on board, invested in more games, massive investments in technology.

And that bit does play through, if you look at our Companies House filings revenues are up but profits are down and those aren't because we're doing a crap job, that's because we're consciously taking those profits and ploughing them back into the business. Which wasn't something we did in the past, we used to pay dividends every quarter for a good number of years, whereas since they've come on board we haven't paid any dividends, and we've just been ploughing that money back into the business and growing the business as a whole.

So to me obviously I'm very close to it, to me it seems obvious that this is a good thing. But I think it's one of those classic things, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and jumping onto one piece of tenuous information and with numerous facts that are wrong, it's very easy to draw conclusions that quite frankly just aren't there. But yeah, as I say, the business goes from strength to strength, we've invested more in games like Runescape than we ever have in our entire history. Both monetary terms and in terms of talent, infrastructure and everything else, invested in new games, and I think that's what it takes if we want to be in the strong position to be the UK's number one developer and publisher, indie developer and publisher.

We have the ability thanks to this to get really cool office space, we used to be in multiple buildings which was really suboptimal in terms of being one big team, one big family. And again, we've been able to bring everyone together in a really high spec new studio, under one roof, so I guess if you were this side of the building you'd probably see the really positive changes that have come from this.

I was surprised because the narrative somehow seemed to read that this was a big sell out whereas it couldn't be further from the truth. Of course for the founders there was some liquidity involved in that, but by and large they're still involved in the business, rather than truly having sold out in that sense. I think it's disrespectful to the 468 other people who are left behind who are all working incredibly hard to make everything we do a success, and as I say to really make Britain the place to be for great games and great success stories.

There's only one management team and they're in Cambridge.

The insinuation that this is a company that somehow now is run by bankers in the US again couldn't be further from the truth. We're blessed that we have a board that serve, that are so seasoned astute, and serve in a fantastic advisory capacity for us. I really relish having that acumen around the table. The reality and the truth of it is that all business decisions in terms of what games we're going to make this year, where we're going to invest, where we want to take our tech and all that really still gets driven by the current management. And there's only one management team and they're in Cambridge.

So sure, the guys ask us tough questions to make sure we're thinking about everything. And I think again that's what it takes to make sure you can compete with global markets in a global space. Again for us, as a small British company in comparison to the others, one misplaced footstep could be terminal on some level whereas the bigger studios can just wear that multimillion pound loss here or there like, "so what?" For Jagex that could be significantly detrimental. So I'm deeply grateful for the fact that we have such a robust board that makes sure that anything we put in front of them gets maximum scrutiny, because it feels like we're that much more likely to back the right horses and everything we work on has to be a success really, if we continue to grow and compete.