Casting the Runes

Not at all. As I say again, it couldn't be further from the truth. Obviously I've known Insight for a number of years, even when I wasn't CEO and they always served in that capacity and the feedback around the board table was "are you guys thinking about that? What are your thoughts on this topic? Are you worried about that? Can we get bit more intel on the following?" Rather than "all change now, we think the future is in mobile games."

Even when they went from the minority stake to the majority stake that hasn't changed. They've just become closer friends, partners really for us. The talent and the expertise pool, the wisdom pool, if I can call it that, has grown significantly but that's, again, that's needed if we're going to make sure we're very surefooted and continue to deliver to succeed.

Absolutely right. And to that point both I and everyone working here is deeply appreciative for that, because we now feel we can go from a one product company to a multi product, multi successful product company. At the same time none of us trivialise the enormity of that task, it really is a fine balance between building up the right teams in terms of expertise, having the capital to actually go out now and tell the word about your next big thing. The long investments in technology and stuff that don't necessarily pay dividends until a number of years out, it takes a lot of vision and substance to get behind a lot of the stuff we're working on.

There was never a pressure for us to do anything or a need for us to sell any shares or attract investment.

But again, that's what we believe it takes to be a company that in 2020 you're writing about saying "wow, how did they do it, and what a great story." So absolutely, and I think we're doing far greater stuff now in terms of specifically tech and tackling more games than we ever have in our past.

Both are true actually. So without doubt American investment mindset is far more attuned to this market and understanding of fast paced tech, change, content, entertainment. And I suppose also... so on that point absolutely, and I don't think there's the, and I don't want to do anyone a disservice of course, but from my exposure to people in UK, European investment space, it tends to be painfully shy, risk averse by and large.

Maybe that's not, as I say, a blanket or fair statement whereas the Americans are far more, by and large, to say "here's a great team, with a great pedigree, let's go help and have some fun and we'll see what happens, but we think it will be a good outcome." So that seems to feel far far easier to be done stateside.

But at the same time of course we knew Insight well, we got on fabulously with them, we knew they'd be good partners going forward. The crucial point is, and you'll probably know this anyway, there was never a pressure for us to do anything or a need for us to sell any shares or attract investment. We were very selective and we spent almost a year determining who would come in and who we'd allow to become part of the Jagex family, and we were very careful to make sure everyone that came in would really contribute in a really meaningful way apart from just writing a cheque.

Anyone, I mean not anyone, but numerous people would like to have written the Jagex cheque if they had the opportunity to do so, and we dated very very selectively. And we're very happy where we've ended up. And at the same time that's why we never did a big roadshow and as would be typical of other companies in the space to have a big "for sale" sign outside our door because we never were for sale. And we don't see ourselves even for sale today. We see ourselves as having brought on some very thoughtful, very smart, strategic investors and really wanting to become the Google for online games over the next couple of years.

And obviously between now and then we need to make a number of very good games that achieve and exceed even the numbers that we've seen from Runescape. And we feel in great shape to do that with this current cohort.

Yes indeed. So there's that and of course we launched Eight Realms, our first casual, realtime, strategy browser game a few weeks back. We've been very quiet about that, it's still in a VIP beta if you will. But we're very very happy with that and the numbers and the conversions and everything is tracking well well well above our initial expectations.

We see ourselves as having brought on some very thoughtful, very smart, strategic investors and really wanting to become the Google for online games.

So yeah, I think 2012 is going to be a very exciting year, we're obviously going to continue to invest heavily in Runescape and that will go from strength to strength. We will I think see great things coming from Eight Realms, which is also a plug-in-less browser experience and our work on our next big MMOs will come to fruition this year and so I think yeah, 2012 is an interesting year. It's a year of no doubt a tonne of hard work, if this was easy obviously everyone would do it. I'm very excited for the year ahead and everyone in the studio is very focused on, not just making Runescape and Eight Realms a financial success, but our work on Stellar Dawn and even Transformers coming together to make a truly great game for this year and then again, you know, they'll be another in the following year. So none of us are daunted by that, but all of us understand the enormity and even the focus required to make all those things a success.

So a very exciting year for us, but you probably won't hear that much from us because we'll just be back here in Cambridge working really really hard.

Exactly. And if no one notices while we slowly creep up and do some great things I'd be happy with that too. Unfortunately when you're number one you're in everyone's cross hairs and the only place to go is number two. We'd like to be as quiet and understated as possible and just get on and make great games.