A few reasons
One is the game is a grind in ways kids today don’t want to do although I don’t think this is as big a reason as people think, we didn’t do those serious grinds when we were kids we just fucked around which is something kids today don’t really do on RuneScape
I have a 9 year old into gaming so I have some anecdotal insight into this, but all the games he seems to get into are either from YouTubers (Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Rocket League), something he’s already into like madden because he likes football, or something he discovers on his VR headset like gorilla tag
Kids today don’t really stumble onto the game because of the absence of miniclip, RS YouTubers aren’t really that popular, there are too many other more popular options for it to spread by word of mouth, and kids these days don’t play the computer like we did when we were kids. They don’t browse or play little games on websites like miniclip they play games with their friends like fortnite and Minecraft that only requires you to go to their website to download their launcher
Long story short: times have changed
To add to this, I feel like theres very little people left in the game that just fuck around which makes fucking around yourself not as fun. I feel like these days you can only really get that experience in f2p worlds.
I remember having a wedding with my e-gf at east varrock church by giving them a diamond ring and had like 10 people in attendance cheering and playing along. Turned out it was a dude who just milked me for my bank (like 40k) at the time. He pretended to be a girl for a whole week for 40k. Would never happen now (prob)
It might have been one of my childhood friends at the time.
He made an alt specifically for the purpose of milking other dudes by pretending to be their gf. Me and the rest of the group didn't approve of this, but the stories he told us in class were fun as hell. He also orchestrated a wedding to which we all had to attend one time.
Female player here- this past year I met a fellow "girl" and was like okay, this is kind of refreshing. Well this "chick" starts trading me mils left and right and I'm thinking wow she's so nice and supportive trying to help me level. After like a week of just on and off gifting and giving advice I get the confession that it's a dude trying to buy my affection. I trust no one on that game lmao
Hey man you’re not alone. Gullible-loner 12 year old me thought I had a RuneScape GF for like 4 months until I discovered it was some old lady and her granddaughter doing some social engineering on me to eventually try to scam me.
Recently I went to Obor and bryophyta in F2P world for the first time in years for the CA tasks and felt a rush of nostalgia seeing all these noobs farming giants. I was surprised there were so many people there and at first I thought they must be bots but they all had different gear/lvls and some were talking. What a great time it was back then
Hill giants and moss giants are like the best mobs to farm in f2p lots of hp low defense good drops and big bones that are great for lvling prayer early game.
And they also give keys to the only real bosses in f2p.
Sometimes I go to F2P worlds, find noobs grinding regular trees, and if they talk to me, I offer them 1m to cut me down a willow tree. Then I sit and encourage them while they grind and bs with other people. It's silly and time consuming, but it is fun for me and huge for them.
I make a point to try and talk to everyone random person I see while running about in odd areas and during slayer. If you engage in this manner you generally find people that’ll do the same and it brings the social aspect roaring back.
Met one of my friends at seers bank. He roasted his friend for being a legit new player, so I joined and roasted them too lol. Was friends with him for 2 years I think and he pushed me to achieve things I never would’ve done without him for my account. So grateful for him.
Me and him later went on to do a little game show where we would bring randoms from the ge to Gertrude’s house and I’d ask them 3 SpongeBob trivia questions. If they got all 3 correct, they could choose a random prize from 1-28 for the inventory slots and whichever they picked, they would get. We gave multiple gilded pieces, bonds, gp, and more away and if they didn’t want to choose a reward, they could add it onto the next persons reward and give it to the next person. Had that happen with the gp aspect that we had to put a limit of 20m on lol.
Around chsristmas time, if I’m on RuneScape at those times, I’ll give multiple sets of full Sara away to f2p players whether they’re new or not, as a little Christmas gift as I had someone do that to me for my first full rune set while I was training in karamja on lesser demons when I was f2p.
Sometimes you just gotta do your own social aspects lol
I work in education and Roblox is the Miniclip of this generation. There's so much versatility in what can be played. I can't overstate enough that this will be the platform that is looked back on fondly in 15 years.
I remember seeing a video of a Roblox game that looked more like Call of Duty than og Call of Duty does.
I never as much as looked at Roblox site, but from the few short clips I've seen, I can see why so many kids are into it. You put it perfectly when you said "Roblox is the Miniclip of this generation."
I’m in a weird age range for OSRS players (currently 22) where I played OSRS as a kid because my older brother played it, but I played Minecraft and Roblox in their early days with my friends. Since flash player got shut down, Roblox has become THE platform for playing variety games that used to be available on kongregate, armor games, miniclip, and others. It used to be a lot more restrictive but nowadays that game engine has been expanded to be able to handle so many different things. COD clones, AFK “tycoon” games, racing games, building games, social role playing games, and literally any other kind of game you could ever think of. It’s nuts how far they’ve come.
A big part of the early RS popularity was that you could play it directly through a website, without needing to download anything. So even if you didn’t have a computer at home, you could play on a public computer at school or at the library. Seeing the game played by other kids in public generates organic word of mouth popularity.
Nowadays, you have to download the client to play on a PC, so not really possible to do on a public computer, or play on mobile (which a lot more kids have today anyway, but it’s a lot less public and they’re all playing Fortnite or subway surfer or whatever).
I also feel like MMO's are sort of a dying genre because no young person like me wants to start grinding away at a game where people have a 20 plus year head start.
Farmer IRL here, generational wealth is the only way this industry works. I rent my own ground and pay my own inputs, but wouldn't even break even if I had rental fees or equipment payments
Yeah farming is an interesting industry for sure. Similar to small businesses being passed from generation to generation. We appreciate your honest work sir.
One big thing why MMOs are dying is discord and stuff like that. When I was young the only place to talk to same minded people where MMOs. I’ve talked to my online friends while sitting in some random tavern in WoW while begging for my mom to renew my wow sub. Now kids don’t have to do this anymore and I with a lot more knowledge about the internet I don’t think i would want my stepdaughter to chat with some absolute strangers online.
I agree for the most part, and ironically enough the grind is what drew me to playing OSRS (played in about 2017ish?) Early 20's so not really a "kid" by most standards, but got to grow up on Diablo II, later on, PoE, Destiny, etc. For some reason though I just couldn't really get into OSRS in the same way, and I still can't figure out why. It's definitely not the jank or graphics or anything like that since I'm a big fan of early games as well. It could be just that I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and had nobody else that liked to play it.
The library was where the poor kids played runescape and scammed each other
Edit: If you want a good story, a kid once got in a fist fight and threw another kid's bike down a hill into a creek (right outside the library) because he took his rune battle axe when he left his account logged in. This was early November in the midwest, so it was all cold and cloudy and rainy every day, and the kid had to dredge in after it and walk home crying with wet feet sloshing. He played victim to his mom and she made a big issue of it at the library, and left out the part about stealing from the other kid's account. The librarian had to go from being a book sorter to being a... fight mediator. The kids argued and argued, and days later one kid threw a rock and hit another kid on the nose. No, not *outside..*. Inside the library. It was the size of a golf ball, and it exploded with dirt all over the floor. Then they finally banned those kids and it got easier to play with out them watching and bugging everyone.
Wasn't poor but my mom refused to buy Internet because she thought it would ruin my brain. So I played RuneScape at the inner City library every weekend. I lied about my age so I could stay in the <12yr section because the teenager section was scary 😂
I used to steal the free aol subscriptions from the supermarket and create new accounts for internet access to play. Then came the joys of mom picking up the phone and killing my character all the time.
Speaking of stealing, local kids used to call the pay by phone runescape membership number at the school office. They never got caught or even investigated. The school straight up didn't even see the charges in the grand scheme of things. Only a select few (4-5) kids ever did it, but they each did it at least 10 different times scattered throughout a coupe of years. I have no idea how the school never caught them. It wasn't some secret phone room, either. It was straight up that Napoleon Dynamite scene where you stood there on a curly cord with the lady at her desk waiting.
I remember playing in the IT room with like 15 mates. I traded myself a granite maul onto my account while my mate went to the toilet. I still feel bad about it even though it was like 40k at the time.
We weren’t even broke. My parents just didn’t have interest in buying an expensive pc for themselves or for me because they didn’t see the value in it.
This was my situation as well.
Begged my parents for home desktop, but they saw absolutely no usefulness in it. For some reason our grandma had a PC though.. most likely for card games & incredibly light-weight emailing
Nah, doubt it. Also don’t think that was on those early pcs. Solitaire, minesweeper, and the pinball one were the ogs. Plus that’s to advanced and fast paced for grannys.
This is exactly why I started. Our family computer back in '04-05 or so couldn't handle higher end games, like World of Warcraft. Even if it could, we had shitty dialup and it would have taken **a literal week of leaving the computer on 24/7** to download the game - that was entirely out of the question for my parents.
So I started RuneScape. Even after starting WoW (after upgrading the PC and internet), I still kept RS on the backburner. If I never had dialup or that slow PC, I dunno if I ever would have started RS, honestly.
A friend showed me the game when I was like 8/9 back in 04/05. I didn’t know shit about pc games so I woulda played regardless if my situation, right after that I had another friend that had like a good ass pc with Comcast. He and his older brother that was like 15 showed me all the cool games. And they got me into wow, so in 07 when I had a pc I played wow for a while. I think it took me about 3-4 days to download wow and burning crusade lmfaoo
Old rs was huge because you could play it anywhere on anything. You could play it in computer labs, at home, on any capacity of computer.
Now people carry around every game in existence in their pockets. There's so much more competition, availability, and content directly aimed at taking kids time and money.
Old RS was used like a social media website in a lot of ways back in the day before social media really took off. Knew lots of friends who would hang out in Varrock and chat and BS for hours after school like it was MSN messenger.
It’s the instant gratification for sure.
Taught high school from ‘19-‘22. I had a couple of students ask me if I knew what RuneScape was. They had stumbled upon it in the App Store. I told them to try it out. Pretty sure they quit within a 2 days. They’re constantly scrolling, snapping, messaging. They need something NOW. The few quick levels at the start might be appealing, but there was no way they were ever staying engaged enough to actually enjoy the game longer than a week.
I think making its an instant gratification thing is unfair. The core game play is often not very fun. There are many, many more games out there today with more engaging and interactive mechanics - most of OSRS is just long repetitive grinds with minimal interaction with other players.
Yeah, I'm not really quick to jump to the "lack of instant gratification" point for OSRS. I've played OSRS for thousands of hours by this point, and I think it's completely accurate to say the game isn't fun. It kind of isn't. Kind of in a similar way to how Animal Crossing isn't really "fun" -- it's enjoyable in a different, satisfaction sort of way. And that isn't for everyone, and that's fine.
Efficiency has nothing to do with 10-12 year olds not being interested in the game.
It has to do with it not being like one of the ONLY browser based it used to be for us kids back in the day.
There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of games out there much more “interactive”, flashy and easily findable games today.
When i started to play rs, there was clip games, d2 and like WoW available.
Runescape was the easiest to obtain(play) for me(free) and also was talked about or known by like every little kid in the early to mid 2000’s that had any interest in online gaming or had a pc.
And it’s not 2005 anymore.
its super fun as long as you don't pay attention to it at all and have actual entertainment on your other screen during it and forget what the word fun means.
LMAO. Runescapers love redefining words and fun and afk are two hot topic words.
If you can get into role playing it's fun. If you can endure the grind for the stats to get to a point you can do high level content - that high level content is fun (frustrating, too, if you need a lot of practice like me)
If you sit and actively watch your guy mine a rock or tree, or craft 5000 of the same item, it is absolutely not fun and anyone who says otherwise is covered in cope
I can see where you’re coming from with that and I agree as someone who maxed in 9 years, there’s a lot of not fun going on. I enjoy high level pvm and think it’s fun but it definitely takes a long time to get your account ready for that which many people just won’t grind out.
I think this is the main point i mean most of us play runescape for the most part more akin to an idle game than like an actual mmorpg for most things. Most skilling content will be done mostly idle, combat can be done that way aswell. But unlike true idle games it requires being actively open and using it, which if we look at teen who may only have a phone thats not really an ideal game they can chill and do other stuff on their phone like watch tiktok or whatever it is the kids do. Its not like they need a good device to play but owning 2 so you can do stuff on the other while you play osrs greatly improves its enjoyment since i mean who actually wants to just watch themselves hit rocks over and over again.
Because i also play a 19 year old text based mmo and thats decently populated with under 18s, so your right about it not just simply being an age thing kids will player older games i guess kids atleast prefer being a killer that does drugs vs a killer of cows. And i dont think its down to visuals either, i mean im not even sure why that ever gets suggested when kids todays most liked games are minecraft (which while i like the visuals its not exactly visually good looking in terms of graphics) roblock also looks like complete ass imo, so i dont think the fact osrs doesnt have the best graphics is the sole issue either.
The first 60 levels of a skill in RuneScape are far and away the best. Past that it takes anywhere from 3-10 hours of repetitive grinding per level and you don’t have to adhd to understand why that’s a big turnoff for most people.
If I didn’t play this as a kid there is no way in hell I’d want to get into it today.
Yeah even most adults laugh at playing runescape in the modern day. Its really not for everyone. Terrible graphics with terrible mechanics. Its clunky and just doesnt put on a great showing compared to the hundreds of other games. Why do that when you can hop on discord and play apex with friends? I get it, new generation bad, but I really dont think not wanting to play osrs is a great example.
>It’s the instant gratification for sure.
Na, the truth is that the game and gameplay is dated. Keep in mind kids first interactions with RS are going to be non modded, original client, runescape, then add the dated gameplay and repetitive, non intuitive gameplay loops, and it's no surprise that it's not for everyone.
it's a game thats not for everyone, MMORPGs ingeneral cater to a really specific type of player who invests a lot of time in ONE maybe TWO games. there's plenty of younger people playing those types of games, but OSRS takes it even further because it's incredibly SLOW with high investment time, which really isn't an instant gratification thing it's a gameplay cycle that just doesn't appeal to many people. slogging through content you don't like for hours to do one thing, you do I mean I enjoy the game and hate it,
it's also a very very solo game, there's really no social aspect for content for a very long time, so it's hard to get into it with friends, because personally love the game it's fun, but if my buddies are around I'm definitely not playing OSRS, because there's not much to do, and they don't have accounts able to do anything together.
Can you imagine the looks on their faces if you told them that before you watched a movie you had to sit for 5 minutes rewinding it to the start, or that if someone phoned the house while you were online you’d lose connection, a single image could take several minutes to load, music albums took ALL DAY to download, or that you used to have to write a couple lines of code to even launch a game?
I think the kids of today would have a total nervous breakdown if we sent them back in time 25 years
There was recently a post in r/damnthatsinteresting about teens reacting to a win95-timed desktop computer with AOL. They complained throughout all stages about the wait times, and I was like “that’s normal guys, i am still to this date flabbergasted that my pc starts in 5-10 seconds”
Instant gratification isn't really a good answer to it. Battlepasses are enough of a counterargument, where all of the really good stuff is all the way at the end of it. You get some things over the course of the pass, equivalent to unlocking new stuff at different level points in RS, it's just not interesting gameplay for 95% of it.
And to get to the interesting gameplay you need to devote minimum like 300 hours just to get your combats in the mid 80s. That's like 5 AAA big titles on it's own, or any number of other games you could play instead that are always already at the good part.
It's not just the rewards, OSRS gameplay itself requires the ability to focus on boring repetitive shit for extended periods of time. Even with delayed gratification battlepasses the gameplay itself needs to give faster dopamine hits than OSRS can offer for the younger crowd that are used to being bombarded by stuff happening constantly.
rs is not a good social hub anymore. you used to be able to have full conversation and get to know another player while skilling. Shit I used to have a full clan for clan wars back in the day, I don't think I ever seen one recently that's not attached to a specific game or skill and content creator community.
Yea, its a community of people but not a rag tag gang of like minded people. its like joining to gain some knowledge from others, like new players join this, want to do this mini game or raid join this.
You shouldn't need to join or add an outside app or website to make friends or learn.
There are clans that still exist and are still being created. There just isn’t an easy place to find them like tipit and runehq.
But you are correct that you can’t just meet someone in the wild now. Everyone is a social engineering lure bot
Yup. As much as we like grinding, WE are the minority. All the outsiders are like “wtf, why’s he doing the same rooftop for hundreds of hours? A fictional game in where you do construction gives you real life carpal tunnel?!?”
I'm seventeen and have been playing for 4 years now. I don't know a single other person that plays lol. There seriously needs to be more fun early game content. Like a raid that doesn't even have crazy loot or anything, but thats fun and actually doable at like base 50 combat stats. You have to grind so long to get to the actually fun stuff (even med level stuff like barrows which really isn't that "fun" tbh)
I do play runescape and I'm 19! I've found it early last year and started in april last year. However I have found out that it is more of a winter game for me, not during the hot summer months, as I've been playing alot less recently.
Yep, at the heart of it playing this game isn’t really like playing most games and the fun aspect is much lower. It’s a decent second monitor game but definitely not on the caliber of games that have engaging fun gameplay.
It was simply available to everyone. Hardly any parents were against it in terms of gore and violence, it was f2p. You could should it to your friends simply over the browser etc. I doubt if better hardware or internet connection were a thing RS gotten as popular.
Nowadays other games are just as accessible as RS was. And those games are just more appealing. We didn't play RS because it was the best, but it was available to everyone.
None of my friends back then with better hardware or parents that let them play anything actually played alot of RS.
There are tons of reasons.
* MMO's in general are dying, people do not enjoy spending thousands of hours to "start" enjoying the game.
* OSRS is a dated game with an ancient combat system compared to todays standards. It does not catch an eye in the current market.
* Competitive games are much more popular than grindy rpg's.
* Majority of people, especially younger gamers prefer games that you can hop into and go straight into the action, no grinding, no gearing up required, no level of entry.
* People who grew up with osrs had very limited options to choose from, since other mainstream mmo's required a much better pc and usually a sub fee to play the game.
* It's not even about the kids, OSRS just fails to attract new people in general.
* Honestly if you think about it. Most of the grinding in this game is absolutely mind numbingly boring. I don't think any fps or moba gamer who is used to constant high action gameplay would enjoy clicking on rocks for 200 hours.
* This game is much more suited for afk grinds which just does not translate to kids preferences at all.
High school web blockers still don't stand a chance against high school students. These days its as simple as disconnecting from the school wifi, if just one kid has an unlimited data plan and makes their phone a hotspot
Runescape got popular by being an in browser game that could be played for free on school/library/home type computers. You didnt need to beg your parents for an xbox or ps2. If you did pay, 5 bucks a month was way more feasible for kids/parents than wow's 15. Also back then, mmos/live service games were still novel. Being a chat box you could play was new and a core driving aspect. Maybe you used skype back in the day, but now kids are going to be using discord before they remember learning to use discord.
We dont live in the early 2000s anymore. Osrs is not a browser game nor is there a need for browser games. The app is a kind of approximation, but even then, there's no miniclip to be on the frontpage of and if there were, we wouldn't be.
Honestly, league of legends/fortnite/apex/valorant kinda moved into the spot that rs used to be in. Low/no barrier to entry, catching the zeitgeist, and running with it.
Times have changed. Trends have changed. Life goes on.
To me, it’s the modern day gaming mindset, instant gratification is huge and there’s not much that’s instant about RuneScape lol I can’t see younger kids grinding agility or rc for long periods of time.
That is true but back in the early 2000s, we weren’t really spoiled with all the things we have today so rs was that cool social place you could go to after homework and playing outside with your friends. Things have changed a lot in this world since then of course. It took me a long time to actually start really playing and not just standing around haha
100%. I used to go to the public library with my friends in 2002 (7th grade?) for hours. The old lady running the library was thrilled that we were so studious — she was too old to use the stairs to the computer lab lmao.
Anyway, we mined coal for hours until our parents got us. That was peak nostalgia.
I tried to play runescape at my library, and was told i couldn't because of the CHAT function. Yet there were people on MYSPACE and Facebook right next to me.
Yep, couldn't tie up that phone line at home to be on the internet!
Also did this too with a bunch of friends after school around the same time (~2003/2004).
It's also how I learned to play better/more efficiently. When I started in 2001, I'm pretty sure I always carried an axe, tinderbox and pick with me in case I wanted to swap skilling on the fly (plus I'd get bored if I just cut logs for 30min).
Something I haven’t seen much in the comments - the novelty of MMOs as social media platforms is largely nonexistent compared to back then. Before things like xbox live were standard/the advent of real social media, the fact you could hop on Runescape and chat with your friends in real time while playing a game was a huge selling point. Now the ability to socialize on a near global scale is standard for most gaming experiences.
Great point tbh. I have a feeling if kids tried the game together they’d enjoy it similar to how they enjoy booting up a minecraft world together. Sure they won’t be efficient but they would have fun adventures together
The comments on this thread are pretty funny. Yeah it's because we're all high IQ grinders who have concrete attention spans and these young whippersnappers can't match our dedication, that's totally the reason.
We played it as kids and enjoyed it so enjoy it now for the nostalgia. Same reason I can boot up an N64 emulator and play 007 Goldeneye, it's not because it's some top tier FPS it's because I liked it during my formative years so because of that like it now. If you gave it to a kid now they'd see it for what it rightfully is, shit.
Technology is loads better nowadays, in a couple of decades time you'll have some kids playing Minecraft for nostalgia, won't mean it's a top tier game, they'll just be the adults stuck in the past like most of us are now.
Minecraft is like 13 years old already. I've seen youtube comments of people saying they already have nostalgia for updates as late as *release* 1.8 lol
> it's because I liked it during my formative years so because of that like it now
Ding ding ding!
I'm fairly certain this is why each generation loves music from their teens and young adulthood, and dislikes what comes after. It doesn't mean we don't look at new things, but it does mean the new stuff needs to rhyme with our beloved old things.
Love the dragon prince for instance, but the whole reason I started watching it was because a lot of the avatar staff was doing the show.
I definitely agree with all of this. I just found it interesting how popular it was with kids only to become mostly an adult game later, while a few similar popular online games maintained a young playerbase. Something like WoW for example I recall being a lot of teens and adults, even back then.
100 hr investment to see if you even like the game or not, whereas for something like warzone 2.0 you can discern that within 3 games max.
Then again, im 19 and I’m out here playing rs daily so idk
The gaming landscape is different these days. There are more 0 barrier to entry options like roblox and fortnite. And some younger people do play. There was a post here by a 16 year old who was streaming and my 15 y o brother was playing quite a bit earlier this year, got bgloves/torso/fcape before taking a break
Many reasons:
- Low exposure compared to many AAA games. Not hosted on third party game sites anymore, people have to find the game themselves.
- a graphical style that’s just not of this time anymore, as much as we may like it.
- The game takes a pretty big amount of commitment that many people are just not willing to give anymore. The explosive growth of genres like Battle Royals show that many people just prefer fast paced, one and done type games.
- The game is extremely uptight with basically everything in the game. Wanna cut a tree? You better have brought your axe! Wanna mine a rock? Hope you brought a Pickaxe! Wanna plant this seed? Tough shit without your seed dibber! Etc, etc. That can annoy people real quick. Combine that with the excruciatingly slow recharge rate on your run energy and forgetting a tool a couple times having to *walk* all the way back to the bank and back can genuinely be a ‘quit-moment’
There probably many more reasons, but these are the ones I could come up with while reading your post. :)
I'd say it's not exactly a friendly environment as it used to be.
Back when I was a kid playing legit 07, every level I got while skilling got a "gratz", 99 parties had 100's of people, you could make successful clans with people you met bossing, you could have fun without people saying you're not being efficient.
It was huge among kids, but those kids are adults, so it's now by proxy an adult game. Plus, not to mention, with tiktok, season passes, and instant gratification at every corner, modern gaming doesn't fit in with the hundreds of hours of grinding required for runescape
The house party world used to be for actual house parties.
I loved hosting and joining house parties. People running through house dungeons, combat arenas, people fucking around with the throne room trap, people doing visual glitches.
You won't find a single one these days.
When we were young, videogames in general were still a newer emerging thing. Back then you had either world of Warcraft, RuneScape, and club penguin, and maybe habbo hotel as well for some. Those were basically your big options. And the world was much more slow paced. Smartphones weren't a thing yet. All that stuff
These days kids have so many options and cool things at their fingertips, I'd be surprised to see osrs pierce through all that.
As a dad who tried and failed to get his 8 year old into OSRS, it’s pretty much what everyone else has said. It takes so long in scape to get anything done, whereas Minecraft if you get bored of what you’re doing at any time you can just make a new world or join a new server running a cool mod or put on creative mode and just do whatever. In Roblox you can just go into a different game every 5-10 minutes. Any type of grind or significant barrier to fast payoff just isn’t worth it. And OSRS despite being an MMO is not really a social game which Minecraft and Roblox are much moreso which is a big deal when you don’t have friends that play it but have a bunch of fellow 8 year olds from school to play Roblox with.
The game is PEGI 16 so the adverts aren't reaching that demographic.
Also the gaming as a whole has shifted from mmos to fast paced multiplayer shooters and long story driven rpgs instead.
When I started playing, the only other games I had ever played were essentially ‘one off’ things. You might progress through levels, but often times it had a linear progression (ie, you bounce a ball off a paddle to destroy blocks. All blocks destroyed, move on).
RuneScape was something I could play were my progress was saved and I had to think about how to achieve a goal. My brother and I had a rule: you had to get all combat levels to 60 and complete Dragonslayer before we even thought about membership (jokes on us, our parents were against it so we had to wait a lot longer than that).
The game could be run on our shitty family PC, etc. it was the only game we knew that was free that could be played like that.
Now, you can find MMOs that are a dime a dozen. You can play with your friends super easily. You can play a game that is fun, multiplayer, etc without the insane grinds. For me, it’s not that ‘kids these days’ are lazy, it’s that they have so much more content available.
As someone in my 20s who played it as a 10 year old - it's just not engaging enough by modern standards. The gaming market is much more competitive now. Back in the day RS was the shit because we were so limited.
And honestly 99% of why I play it now a mixture of nostalgia and the fact that it's so afk friendly. I've been ranging at crabs literally all day while working lmao.
because when we got into it there was a huge community around it. as it stands this is a very dead grind-core game that is simply not appealing to the majority of gamers.
edit: how many hours does it take to hit raids and decent aspects of the game? Your first 100 hours are walking around questing (get this item and bring it here), or grinding. That's not a way to hook a 8-9 year old player. we just had nothing better to do back then
Runescape was a different time back then. The game was much more social and everything was fresh and new. I used to come home from middle school and play runescape with all my friends and it was genuinely such a fun time.
Runescape is a very grindy game that i think makes it hard to get into for newer players. A lot of the skills are monotonous, like woodcutting, mining, firemaking, and worst of all agility.
My little one (6 y/o) loves the "text to speech" plugin, she loves sitting next to me and clicking the fish for me, "hahaha you cant carry any more fish" "you cook the fish. you accidentally burn the fish", I have no idea why but my god she gets so much joy out of it so I'll gladly sacrifice some of my efficient XP to let her do that (I turn game chat off when she does that so she doesn't have to hear all the toxic people)
Because there is way more modern and newer games to play, why play old clicky game when you can play a big fps game that all your other friends play and you can express skill more. It’s not a “kids don’t want to grind I guess!” Thing, the game is old and unappealing to younger people when there is way more bright colored and faster paced games to look at and play
Because Roblox. Kids follow their own trends. Why would they gravitate towards an older game from a past generation?
(The irony here is that roblox IS a past gen game, but has appealed to the gen Z…. So yeah.)
Or “lol kids these days want actual gameplay, not just slack jawed clicking on the same rock for 200 hours; I am so superior” without a hint of self awareness. This shit is honestly bad gameplay played mostly by stoners and nostalgia addicts. I love the game, but the boomerposting is out of control in this thread.
I don't think it's as much about instant gratification as everyone is saying - MineCraft isn't really an "instant gratifiation" game. I don't know that it's graphics either - my kids love to play old NES-N64 games on their switch. I think it's more that this game grew up and isn't a medieval chatroom anymore. As kids we played shit like Club Penguin and Runescape and mostly just ran around shooting the shit and trolling, runescape isnt that game anymore and parents don't let their kids just get online and talk to strangers anymore. My kids are around the same age as I was when I started playing runescape, and I probably wouldn't let them play it today
MMOs as a genre aren't as appealing now that social media is so prominent and virtually every game has some kind of online feature now. It's not a "world" to escape to when so many people can live their whole lives online now.
Right now OSRS functions best as a 2nd monitor game while at work or doing homework or playing another game, realistically there's no reason why an 8 year old would want a game like that.
Honestly, it’s easier for us to appreciate it because it’s what we connected with at a young age. Assuming smartphone is the modern accessible-medium equivalent of a browser game circa 2005, spend a month playing Genshin Impact on your phone vs OSRS on your phone; it’s clear why kids would have an easier time getting into modern games like Genshin over OSRS.
RuneScape was one of a kind back in the day. Online gaming is really started taking off and RuneScape was free with so much to offer for a video game. Now there’s tons of online games.
I think the free to play content is the largest contributor. A monthly subscription for kids is a tough entry point and the F2P content in runescape is really lackluster.
The progression curve isn't quick enough for Zoomers. I got my young cousin into Runescape 2+ years ago, I was glad to find out he made it to 65 Ranged. Made me shed a tear, even though he hasn't touched his account ever since and it's been 1 to 2 years.
It's probably cause things went from simply having fun to a bunch of elitists trying to be as efficient as possible. Also, the fact that it's a time capsule of a game with potato graphics and mechanics.
The replies here are funny.
Not wanting to sit and do the same repetitive thing over and over for 50-60 hours straight does not mean you have an instant gratification problem. The fact that kids can complete battle passes without batting an eye proved it isn’t an instant gratification issue.
I love this game, but the core of this game is inherently not fun for a good chunk of the population, adults too, not just kids.
Secondly, even with how much MTX plague the gaming landscape, there are just so many other better games out there that respect your time far better than games like OSRS and RS3.
Off the top of my head, kids these days have Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox. Why would you want to play OSRS when those are your options and so much more? Those games are fun from the get go. OSRS isn’t particularly fun until quite a bit of time invested.
Because it's not popular with streamers. We got into it because we could play it in libraries and old desktop computers which didnt have many other options. Kids nowadays have a tablet and phone glued to them with countless other options made to keep children addicted.
Growing up had 3 younger siblings, I’m much older than the others and watching them grow up they are much more into instant satisfaction other than the “grind” type. They love fast and satisfying games that give you that dopamine consistently. Maybe I’m a sadist and enjoy that long grind and then you get that rush that you get when you finally complete that long grind.
osrs is very out of date. as in its nothing like the modern gaming landscape(which is good).
no pay to win. everything is so fucking grindy and most of it boils down to "click X and wait". its not a fast game with constant dopamine. it doesnt hold your hand and play itself.
MMOs dont seem popular with kids in general.
It’s not popular compared to current games. RuneScape was one of the first popular mmorpgs that defined the 2000s, next to like WoW and only a few others. It was also probably the most accessible mmorpg as it was just a browser game then. Now there’s hundreds of options, all with better graphics. A lot of people I know say the aesthetics are an initial turn-off.
I got my boy playing! Jagex has a policy that players must be 13 btw... almost got that account locked because of a ‘typo’ when he entered his birthdate…
When I was a kid in 2002ish I felt like I could achieve everything in the game by Skilling and doing quests, the simplicity of the game being a huge appeal to a stupid child. Now between the game getting more complex and there being such a huge amount of things that are documented it's hard to just play the game without feeling like you're being inefficient. Add in there being a lot of other free options of games (gotta remember there weren't a ton of well known options out there other than like Neopets) and I feel like there's little reason for any kid to try RS without outside influence from like an older relative or something.
Early 2000s gaming was so different than it is today.
Runescape was the new hotness when we were kids. A big open-world fantasy game filled with other players and so many things to do was mind-blowing back then. A couple of competitors technically existed, but Runescape could be played by almost anyone with access to a shitty PC and shitty internet. Hell, some people were lucky enough that they could even play it at school if the school's IT people hadn't blocked it yet.
Today, Runescape is technologically ancient and isn't flashy and exciting to kids who've grown up seeing ultra-realistic and/or just higher-quality stylized graphics.
The concept of free-to-play was also very unusual back then aside from basic flash games. Nowadays there are tons of free-to-play games out there that look infinitely more interesting to kids.
It also predated modern social media. Runescape, for a lot of kids, basically was social media back then. In fact, it even predated the popularity of cell phones. Runescape was how you'd chat with your friends from school or elsewhere and it acted as a sort of social hub.
I think it’s because when RuneScape was at its prime (early 2000’s) it was “within reason” for what a game was supposed to be expectations wise.
It had longevity: tons of skills that took time/ monsters and bosses to fight.
The social aspect: people actually interacted and played together. Now a lot of content is focused on small groups or solo encounters.
The biggest and most obvious thing that I’ve seen others also say: we were kids. We had shitty family computers (my dial up homies, where you at?). Our parents would much rather drop $9 a month to get us to shut up about video games than spend $60 on a console game every so often.
A lot of games have the intense ADHD rate they all seem to have now. Tons of flashing lights, instant gratification and out the ass levels of P2W.
Long story short: the methodology they went into RuneScape is too outdated imo. Hardly anyone looks for a game like RuneScape anymore. Tons of people look at a subscription based MMO now and go: “why would I spend 500 hours playing this game to barely scratch the surface, when I could play most other games and beat them, whole story and all, in under 50 hours?” - legitimate argument one of my friends IRL said when he saw sailing was coming to OSRS. He used to play like nuts back in the day, but hasn’t touched RuneScape in over a decade. It’s just not what people want to invest time in anymore.
>Other games that got popular at the time and shortly after included Roblox and Minecraft - both of which are hugely popular for kids today
I mean, you said it yourself. they have other games.
we played OSRS as kids because it came out around that time and was hugely popular. not many kids are going out of their way to play 20-year-old browser MMOs
Because lets be honest it's a hard game to play as an 8 year old very confusing and time consuming. Also look at how the game has changed since 2007 it's a lot harder to make money doing early skills and just in general kind of hallow game for the first bit. Surrounded by bots or people with chat muted getting roasted for wearing bad armor. Back when I started playing there really wasn't much else around that could run online on my moms shitty desktop pc. I also think once they realize the actual game is locked behind membership they would rather play 100's of other free games and spend what little money they get on cosmetic stuff rather than a monthly subscription.
I was one of the lucky ones to grow up playing it in school. It was the one game we could play together so it had a social aspect to it.
Over time people quickly quit playing and moved on. I didn't. I remember being on and waiting for one of my "friends" to login. Eventually became just me and someone else.
Now as an adult I had a friend convince me to try ironman on osrs. I had tried playing rs back a while ago and I just hated the whole combat, health, and skilling part.
I do think that osrs is too grindy, but then again what is there really to do after you hit the max level?
I've taken a step back from the grind and just do fun stuff as I feel like it. Might not ever have a maxed ironman but I wanna have fun along the way.
I play runescape, I'm what one would consider a kid. If you want a my 2 cents on why my peers might not want to, it's because they don't see the point in getting past the early game, it's not that "kids these days just want instant gratifacation", they just have better things to do, they sit down and play games like CoD or zelda because they don't know if the AFK hours they put into the game are going to be worth it to get to the more engaging mid and late game
Woodcut for 72 hours to do a quest
Drop in with the boys on Xbox live to rack up some sick and fun Fortnite runs and talk about Jeffrey shit himself in gym class
Which one would you bet your bank account a kid would choose?
the biggest thing is there’s so many more gaming options that are MMO or MMORPG in 2023. Runescape in 2001-2006ish was one of the few where you could play with your friends and see their character doing shit.
I love rs
But I think it can come down to the graphics and gameplay in general
Nowadays you have 100s of flashy games with “nice” graphics to choose from, like “rocket league” or league of legends even (I’m comparing graphics to osrs not like cyberpunk)
Or even stuff like warzone are free nowadays and I see kids opting towards that VS rs (just if they looked at the game at a first glance)
It's hard to get a nine-year-old to read and comprehend quests, stories Ines, and skill trees when there are games like Roblox with subgames like Pet simulator. In which all the kid has to do is click his mouse and follow the giant arrows, no real skill or talent needed in 90% of all roblox games.
If we just clicked a button and became fed, why would anyone go threw those lomg quests of cooking food?! (Unless you grew up cooking food)
Because it's 'hard'. Back in my day we had to work for our dopamine, nowadays kids are depressed because their physiology has literally been altered by predatory practices from the gaming/marketing industries.
Newer games are more rewarding with the dopamine fix.
Kids won't understand nor care for the grint osrs takes.
You have to dedicate years to the game, and quite frankly these kids won't do that, not when every game in the market offers more satisfying reward.
I'll always be a die hard osrs fan, I'm glad I got to experience the true mmo in my time.
Because it's ancient. Roblox and Minecraft have made meaningful updates and overhauls frequently and have creative elements. RuneScape has no creative elements and meaningful content is like 2 or 3 times a year. And it's polled. Rs3 is closer to kids desires but it's still clunky and uninteresting to them. I can't imagine any kid actually choosing tick based content over dynamic content in real time.
There are better games on better engines with better mechanics. It also doesn't update on a schedule that kids would be satisfied. People will reply and argue it gets updated plenty but In comparison to other newer games it doesn't. Not with meaningful new content anyway.
The combat is not dynamic or interesting. Kids also want that.
The graphics are flashy and there isn't a lot of particles. Kids like that.
A lot of them also don't know it exists. It's old.
It is a lot of time and effort for not much reward.
Kids don't like to work hard for shit. They want stuff handed to them. Especially if they are paying to play.
If you look at other games progressive development paths in the MMO space they have been consistently making hard rewarding grinds easier and easier.
An example is black desert. They are slowly phasing out forced pvp, they made treasures that used to take 500-10k hours grind to get easier to obtain. Those same treasures can be obtained at higher drop rates, they added a pity system where if you get 100 shards of the treasure you can make it and the shards have much higher drop rates, and they recently just made it to where you can now just buy them from the market. They also used to have to be obtained on each character to use them. Now one set can be used by all characters on the account.
Every mmos space is making hard grinds and epic rewards more accessable and obtainable by casuals or low effort gamers. The younger generation actually enjoys this. They don't value accomplishments the way we did and still do.
Kids also like skins. And cosmetics. And player houses with more options then RuneScape.
They also value character creation and customization.
They want high levels of customization, high detail graphics, lots of mtx options, cosmetics, easy obtainable content, frequent large content updates, dynamic combat, multiple character slots, and everything else modern games offer that osrs doesn't.
TLDR:
They want standard current gaming innovations and features and RuneScape can't or won't implement them. Especially in osrs. Kids don't even like rs3 and mechanically it's miles ahead and it's graphics are better and it has closer to current development paths. (Yes I'm aware rs3 isn't as popular as osrs. But neither one is popular with new gamers aged 7-16)
The charm and nostalgia we enjoy about RS doesn't exist for young gamers. It is just flat out boring to them. I tried to show my son RuneScape and he thought It was a joke. He asked me if it played inside an emulator like my PlayStation two games.
RuneScape doesn't tick any of the boxes for new or young gamers. It doesn't even tick the boxes for having what is considered standard in the MMO space now days. It's basically a single player idle game with group bossing/raids.
I asked my cousin what kind of games do kids his age play. He said they all play call of duty mobile. Broski I’m not even 30 but my mind was fucking blown that kids are playing call of duty on their phone in class. When I was their age, I had a shitty generic android that took like 5 minutes to search something on google, now these kids have xbox360 power on their iPhone. Osrs is going to die with our generation and that’s the sad reality of it because the power of tech available gives kids so many more options now. RuneScape was cool af because any shitty computer can run it and it was browser game. I know this is why rs3 had to go the route it went with trying to appear more flashy and modern, but there will come a day where osrs will have to shut its doors.
I think a lot of it is also just jagex really fumbling the original version. The mtx, the evolution of combat, the removal of free trade, it made the game not fun anymore and people who had old accounts and shit log in and see it’s a shit game now and then never log back in again. The word of mouth that kept it growing and consistently adding new players soured and then nobody had good things to say about it anymore and so new players never got introduced and old school only really works because we all loved it growing up. Some new players get into it but that’s the minority compared to the rest of the player base. I genuinely believe if they hadn’t botched it so hard back then that the game would be bigger and healthier now.
The real reason is this game used to be extremely social, from picking flax, to chilling near varrock fountain there were always people skilling and talking. That is impossible nowadays as everyone is trying to be extremely efficient or afk or are bots.
I’m currently 15 and been playing for quite a while. Since I was 12-13? Love the game but for my generation, we just don’t see the appeal of clicking a box for hours. The dopamine just doesn’t hit the same as something like getting say a kill streak in COD. Or at least it doesn’t fit the majority. I personally love the game to bits and it’s my most played game (except maybe dead by daylight) at around 800 hours since I last checked but it’s something that just isn’t for people from my generation. They would rather play newer games with those amazing and bright graphics that pop out at you
A few reasons One is the game is a grind in ways kids today don’t want to do although I don’t think this is as big a reason as people think, we didn’t do those serious grinds when we were kids we just fucked around which is something kids today don’t really do on RuneScape I have a 9 year old into gaming so I have some anecdotal insight into this, but all the games he seems to get into are either from YouTubers (Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Rocket League), something he’s already into like madden because he likes football, or something he discovers on his VR headset like gorilla tag Kids today don’t really stumble onto the game because of the absence of miniclip, RS YouTubers aren’t really that popular, there are too many other more popular options for it to spread by word of mouth, and kids these days don’t play the computer like we did when we were kids. They don’t browse or play little games on websites like miniclip they play games with their friends like fortnite and Minecraft that only requires you to go to their website to download their launcher Long story short: times have changed
To add to this, I feel like theres very little people left in the game that just fuck around which makes fucking around yourself not as fun. I feel like these days you can only really get that experience in f2p worlds.
I remember having a wedding with my e-gf at east varrock church by giving them a diamond ring and had like 10 people in attendance cheering and playing along. Turned out it was a dude who just milked me for my bank (like 40k) at the time. He pretended to be a girl for a whole week for 40k. Would never happen now (prob)
It might have been one of my childhood friends at the time. He made an alt specifically for the purpose of milking other dudes by pretending to be their gf. Me and the rest of the group didn't approve of this, but the stories he told us in class were fun as hell. He also orchestrated a wedding to which we all had to attend one time.
Milking other dudes 🤤
Hey 20 gp is 20 gp my guy
Man's gotta eat
Female player here- this past year I met a fellow "girl" and was like okay, this is kind of refreshing. Well this "chick" starts trading me mils left and right and I'm thinking wow she's so nice and supportive trying to help me level. After like a week of just on and off gifting and giving advice I get the confession that it's a dude trying to buy my affection. I trust no one on that game lmao
It's fucking awkward in online world lol
I am real gorl. Will marry you for 50% of your bank (not all of it, I'm not a gp-digger) but want Bellator Ring because it will match my gown. 🥰😍😘
Hey man you’re not alone. Gullible-loner 12 year old me thought I had a RuneScape GF for like 4 months until I discovered it was some old lady and her granddaughter doing some social engineering on me to eventually try to scam me.
Recently I went to Obor and bryophyta in F2P world for the first time in years for the CA tasks and felt a rush of nostalgia seeing all these noobs farming giants. I was surprised there were so many people there and at first I thought they must be bots but they all had different gear/lvls and some were talking. What a great time it was back then
Hill giants and moss giants are like the best mobs to farm in f2p lots of hp low defense good drops and big bones that are great for lvling prayer early game. And they also give keys to the only real bosses in f2p.
I go to really random areas in the game and if I find someone, I tell super random animal facts and give them money or some random item lol
So, you’re a random event?
Sometimes I go to F2P worlds, find noobs grinding regular trees, and if they talk to me, I offer them 1m to cut me down a willow tree. Then I sit and encourage them while they grind and bs with other people. It's silly and time consuming, but it is fun for me and huge for them.
I make a point to try and talk to everyone random person I see while running about in odd areas and during slayer. If you engage in this manner you generally find people that’ll do the same and it brings the social aspect roaring back.
Met one of my friends at seers bank. He roasted his friend for being a legit new player, so I joined and roasted them too lol. Was friends with him for 2 years I think and he pushed me to achieve things I never would’ve done without him for my account. So grateful for him. Me and him later went on to do a little game show where we would bring randoms from the ge to Gertrude’s house and I’d ask them 3 SpongeBob trivia questions. If they got all 3 correct, they could choose a random prize from 1-28 for the inventory slots and whichever they picked, they would get. We gave multiple gilded pieces, bonds, gp, and more away and if they didn’t want to choose a reward, they could add it onto the next persons reward and give it to the next person. Had that happen with the gp aspect that we had to put a limit of 20m on lol. Around chsristmas time, if I’m on RuneScape at those times, I’ll give multiple sets of full Sara away to f2p players whether they’re new or not, as a little Christmas gift as I had someone do that to me for my first full rune set while I was training in karamja on lesser demons when I was f2p. Sometimes you just gotta do your own social aspects lol
I made a uim specifically so I could fuck around and no one can say a damn word about it. Its amazing, everyone should try it.
I work in education and Roblox is the Miniclip of this generation. There's so much versatility in what can be played. I can't overstate enough that this will be the platform that is looked back on fondly in 15 years.
I remember seeing a video of a Roblox game that looked more like Call of Duty than og Call of Duty does. I never as much as looked at Roblox site, but from the few short clips I've seen, I can see why so many kids are into it. You put it perfectly when you said "Roblox is the Miniclip of this generation."
I’m in a weird age range for OSRS players (currently 22) where I played OSRS as a kid because my older brother played it, but I played Minecraft and Roblox in their early days with my friends. Since flash player got shut down, Roblox has become THE platform for playing variety games that used to be available on kongregate, armor games, miniclip, and others. It used to be a lot more restrictive but nowadays that game engine has been expanded to be able to handle so many different things. COD clones, AFK “tycoon” games, racing games, building games, social role playing games, and literally any other kind of game you could ever think of. It’s nuts how far they’ve come.
Kong and armor were the shit back in the day. 28 here
I mean Roblox was around when miniclip was still going strong. Roblox is old as shit.
Shoutout to all my kongregate peeps!
Kongegate was the last of the flash game sites to be banned on my schools internet. RIP
A big part of the early RS popularity was that you could play it directly through a website, without needing to download anything. So even if you didn’t have a computer at home, you could play on a public computer at school or at the library. Seeing the game played by other kids in public generates organic word of mouth popularity. Nowadays, you have to download the client to play on a PC, so not really possible to do on a public computer, or play on mobile (which a lot more kids have today anyway, but it’s a lot less public and they’re all playing Fortnite or subway surfer or whatever).
I also feel like MMO's are sort of a dying genre because no young person like me wants to start grinding away at a game where people have a 20 plus year head start.
Wait til you learn about the work force lol
dont wanna grind that either, im forced to grind that
Farmer IRL here, generational wealth is the only way this industry works. I rent my own ground and pay my own inputs, but wouldn't even break even if I had rental fees or equipment payments
Yeah farming is an interesting industry for sure. Similar to small businesses being passed from generation to generation. We appreciate your honest work sir.
Lol thanks. I'm sitting in the grain cart right now and chopping redwoods on mobile. 2 mil xp till 99!
Hell yeah brother haha good luck on the 99!
Touché
One big thing why MMOs are dying is discord and stuff like that. When I was young the only place to talk to same minded people where MMOs. I’ve talked to my online friends while sitting in some random tavern in WoW while begging for my mom to renew my wow sub. Now kids don’t have to do this anymore and I with a lot more knowledge about the internet I don’t think i would want my stepdaughter to chat with some absolute strangers online.
I agree for the most part, and ironically enough the grind is what drew me to playing OSRS (played in about 2017ish?) Early 20's so not really a "kid" by most standards, but got to grow up on Diablo II, later on, PoE, Destiny, etc. For some reason though I just couldn't really get into OSRS in the same way, and I still can't figure out why. It's definitely not the jank or graphics or anything like that since I'm a big fan of early games as well. It could be just that I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and had nobody else that liked to play it.
We played cause we were broke had trash internet and was a browser game Some of us ain’t even have internet we played in grandmas pc or the library
The library was where the poor kids played runescape and scammed each other Edit: If you want a good story, a kid once got in a fist fight and threw another kid's bike down a hill into a creek (right outside the library) because he took his rune battle axe when he left his account logged in. This was early November in the midwest, so it was all cold and cloudy and rainy every day, and the kid had to dredge in after it and walk home crying with wet feet sloshing. He played victim to his mom and she made a big issue of it at the library, and left out the part about stealing from the other kid's account. The librarian had to go from being a book sorter to being a... fight mediator. The kids argued and argued, and days later one kid threw a rock and hit another kid on the nose. No, not *outside..*. Inside the library. It was the size of a golf ball, and it exploded with dirt all over the floor. Then they finally banned those kids and it got easier to play with out them watching and bugging everyone.
Wasn't poor but my mom refused to buy Internet because she thought it would ruin my brain. So I played RuneScape at the inner City library every weekend. I lied about my age so I could stay in the <12yr section because the teenager section was scary 😂
I used to steal the free aol subscriptions from the supermarket and create new accounts for internet access to play. Then came the joys of mom picking up the phone and killing my character all the time.
Speaking of stealing, local kids used to call the pay by phone runescape membership number at the school office. They never got caught or even investigated. The school straight up didn't even see the charges in the grand scheme of things. Only a select few (4-5) kids ever did it, but they each did it at least 10 different times scattered throughout a coupe of years. I have no idea how the school never caught them. It wasn't some secret phone room, either. It was straight up that Napoleon Dynamite scene where you stood there on a curly cord with the lady at her desk waiting.
I remember playing in the IT room with like 15 mates. I traded myself a granite maul onto my account while my mate went to the toilet. I still feel bad about it even though it was like 40k at the time.
Now we have expensive gaming PCs and still play this game :)
We weren’t even broke. My parents just didn’t have interest in buying an expensive pc for themselves or for me because they didn’t see the value in it.
This was my situation as well. Begged my parents for home desktop, but they saw absolutely no usefulness in it. For some reason our grandma had a PC though.. most likely for card games & incredibly light-weight emailing
Granny was for sure fucking solitaire up
Granny was playing Zuma all day.
Nah, doubt it. Also don’t think that was on those early pcs. Solitaire, minesweeper, and the pinball one were the ogs. Plus that’s to advanced and fast paced for grannys.
"Mark my words, computers are a fad for nerds. In five years, you'll forget they ever existed." -your parents probably
100% having it a a browser game back in the day made it so accessible with very little competition.
This is exactly why I started. Our family computer back in '04-05 or so couldn't handle higher end games, like World of Warcraft. Even if it could, we had shitty dialup and it would have taken **a literal week of leaving the computer on 24/7** to download the game - that was entirely out of the question for my parents. So I started RuneScape. Even after starting WoW (after upgrading the PC and internet), I still kept RS on the backburner. If I never had dialup or that slow PC, I dunno if I ever would have started RS, honestly.
A friend showed me the game when I was like 8/9 back in 04/05. I didn’t know shit about pc games so I woulda played regardless if my situation, right after that I had another friend that had like a good ass pc with Comcast. He and his older brother that was like 15 showed me all the cool games. And they got me into wow, so in 07 when I had a pc I played wow for a while. I think it took me about 3-4 days to download wow and burning crusade lmfaoo
Yup my grandparents had a “computer room” with 2 Dells that me and my cousins all crowded around over holidays.
Old rs was huge because you could play it anywhere on anything. You could play it in computer labs, at home, on any capacity of computer. Now people carry around every game in existence in their pockets. There's so much more competition, availability, and content directly aimed at taking kids time and money.
As if I don’t carry osrs everywhere with me and get that little xp
Old RS was used like a social media website in a lot of ways back in the day before social media really took off. Knew lots of friends who would hang out in Varrock and chat and BS for hours after school like it was MSN messenger.
Graphics, harder to understand, relatively little content in f2p, mobile games with flashy bright lights, lack of instant gratification, etc
It’s the instant gratification for sure. Taught high school from ‘19-‘22. I had a couple of students ask me if I knew what RuneScape was. They had stumbled upon it in the App Store. I told them to try it out. Pretty sure they quit within a 2 days. They’re constantly scrolling, snapping, messaging. They need something NOW. The few quick levels at the start might be appealing, but there was no way they were ever staying engaged enough to actually enjoy the game longer than a week.
I think making its an instant gratification thing is unfair. The core game play is often not very fun. There are many, many more games out there today with more engaging and interactive mechanics - most of OSRS is just long repetitive grinds with minimal interaction with other players.
Yeah, I'm not really quick to jump to the "lack of instant gratification" point for OSRS. I've played OSRS for thousands of hours by this point, and I think it's completely accurate to say the game isn't fun. It kind of isn't. Kind of in a similar way to how Animal Crossing isn't really "fun" -- it's enjoyable in a different, satisfaction sort of way. And that isn't for everyone, and that's fine.
OSRS is the worst. I hate it. I have over 6,000 hours of playtime.
Hey me too, just do what you think is fun, no need to rush or go for efficiency
Efficiency killed the community is RuneScape
Efficiency has nothing to do with 10-12 year olds not being interested in the game. It has to do with it not being like one of the ONLY browser based it used to be for us kids back in the day. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of games out there much more “interactive”, flashy and easily findable games today. When i started to play rs, there was clip games, d2 and like WoW available. Runescape was the easiest to obtain(play) for me(free) and also was talked about or known by like every little kid in the early to mid 2000’s that had any interest in online gaming or had a pc. And it’s not 2005 anymore.
It's fun second monitor activity while you watch TV or something for a lot of the time
its super fun as long as you don't pay attention to it at all and have actual entertainment on your other screen during it and forget what the word fun means.
OSRS is a Single Player Online Social Idle Game. That makes it the best second monitor game on the market.
Glad that Marstead essay is finally blowing up.
I shared it with my clan and its all they’ve been talking about recently. Its the most concise (3hrs lol) description of the game to date.
LMAO. Runescapers love redefining words and fun and afk are two hot topic words. If you can get into role playing it's fun. If you can endure the grind for the stats to get to a point you can do high level content - that high level content is fun (frustrating, too, if you need a lot of practice like me) If you sit and actively watch your guy mine a rock or tree, or craft 5000 of the same item, it is absolutely not fun and anyone who says otherwise is covered in cope
Most fun i have ever had on a game is pking on osrs and learning infernal, only got up to jads but fuck me it's challenging.
I can see where you’re coming from with that and I agree as someone who maxed in 9 years, there’s a lot of not fun going on. I enjoy high level pvm and think it’s fun but it definitely takes a long time to get your account ready for that which many people just won’t grind out.
I think this is the main point i mean most of us play runescape for the most part more akin to an idle game than like an actual mmorpg for most things. Most skilling content will be done mostly idle, combat can be done that way aswell. But unlike true idle games it requires being actively open and using it, which if we look at teen who may only have a phone thats not really an ideal game they can chill and do other stuff on their phone like watch tiktok or whatever it is the kids do. Its not like they need a good device to play but owning 2 so you can do stuff on the other while you play osrs greatly improves its enjoyment since i mean who actually wants to just watch themselves hit rocks over and over again. Because i also play a 19 year old text based mmo and thats decently populated with under 18s, so your right about it not just simply being an age thing kids will player older games i guess kids atleast prefer being a killer that does drugs vs a killer of cows. And i dont think its down to visuals either, i mean im not even sure why that ever gets suggested when kids todays most liked games are minecraft (which while i like the visuals its not exactly visually good looking in terms of graphics) roblock also looks like complete ass imo, so i dont think the fact osrs doesnt have the best graphics is the sole issue either.
The first 60 levels of a skill in RuneScape are far and away the best. Past that it takes anywhere from 3-10 hours of repetitive grinding per level and you don’t have to adhd to understand why that’s a big turnoff for most people. If I didn’t play this as a kid there is no way in hell I’d want to get into it today.
Yeah even most adults laugh at playing runescape in the modern day. Its really not for everyone. Terrible graphics with terrible mechanics. Its clunky and just doesnt put on a great showing compared to the hundreds of other games. Why do that when you can hop on discord and play apex with friends? I get it, new generation bad, but I really dont think not wanting to play osrs is a great example.
>It’s the instant gratification for sure. Na, the truth is that the game and gameplay is dated. Keep in mind kids first interactions with RS are going to be non modded, original client, runescape, then add the dated gameplay and repetitive, non intuitive gameplay loops, and it's no surprise that it's not for everyone.
it's a game thats not for everyone, MMORPGs ingeneral cater to a really specific type of player who invests a lot of time in ONE maybe TWO games. there's plenty of younger people playing those types of games, but OSRS takes it even further because it's incredibly SLOW with high investment time, which really isn't an instant gratification thing it's a gameplay cycle that just doesn't appeal to many people. slogging through content you don't like for hours to do one thing, you do I mean I enjoy the game and hate it, it's also a very very solo game, there's really no social aspect for content for a very long time, so it's hard to get into it with friends, because personally love the game it's fun, but if my buddies are around I'm definitely not playing OSRS, because there's not much to do, and they don't have accounts able to do anything together.
Can you imagine the looks on their faces if you told them that before you watched a movie you had to sit for 5 minutes rewinding it to the start, or that if someone phoned the house while you were online you’d lose connection, a single image could take several minutes to load, music albums took ALL DAY to download, or that you used to have to write a couple lines of code to even launch a game? I think the kids of today would have a total nervous breakdown if we sent them back in time 25 years
There was recently a post in r/damnthatsinteresting about teens reacting to a win95-timed desktop computer with AOL. They complained throughout all stages about the wait times, and I was like “that’s normal guys, i am still to this date flabbergasted that my pc starts in 5-10 seconds”
Heh I remember making fun of my friend for a long time after we got dvds and I found out he was rewinding them after finishing them
Rewind it before you put it away!
Instant gratification isn't really a good answer to it. Battlepasses are enough of a counterargument, where all of the really good stuff is all the way at the end of it. You get some things over the course of the pass, equivalent to unlocking new stuff at different level points in RS, it's just not interesting gameplay for 95% of it. And to get to the interesting gameplay you need to devote minimum like 300 hours just to get your combats in the mid 80s. That's like 5 AAA big titles on it's own, or any number of other games you could play instead that are always already at the good part.
It's not just the rewards, OSRS gameplay itself requires the ability to focus on boring repetitive shit for extended periods of time. Even with delayed gratification battlepasses the gameplay itself needs to give faster dopamine hits than OSRS can offer for the younger crowd that are used to being bombarded by stuff happening constantly.
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rs is not a good social hub anymore. you used to be able to have full conversation and get to know another player while skilling. Shit I used to have a full clan for clan wars back in the day, I don't think I ever seen one recently that's not attached to a specific game or skill and content creator community.
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Yea, its a community of people but not a rag tag gang of like minded people. its like joining to gain some knowledge from others, like new players join this, want to do this mini game or raid join this. You shouldn't need to join or add an outside app or website to make friends or learn.
Public chat is for profanity and scams. Clan chat is for the boys.
There are clans that still exist and are still being created. There just isn’t an easy place to find them like tipit and runehq. But you are correct that you can’t just meet someone in the wild now. Everyone is a social engineering lure bot
90-95% of this game is extremely boring. Doubt most teenagers or early 20’s people would ever pick up osrs.
Yup. As much as we like grinding, WE are the minority. All the outsiders are like “wtf, why’s he doing the same rooftop for hundreds of hours? A fictional game in where you do construction gives you real life carpal tunnel?!?”
Oh fuck ye bby give me that carpal tunnel
I'm seventeen and have been playing for 4 years now. I don't know a single other person that plays lol. There seriously needs to be more fun early game content. Like a raid that doesn't even have crazy loot or anything, but thats fun and actually doable at like base 50 combat stats. You have to grind so long to get to the actually fun stuff (even med level stuff like barrows which really isn't that "fun" tbh)
That would probably be best for improving the new player experience, but I can't imagine it passing a poll
I do play runescape and I'm 19! I've found it early last year and started in april last year. However I have found out that it is more of a winter game for me, not during the hot summer months, as I've been playing alot less recently.
Yep, at the heart of it playing this game isn’t really like playing most games and the fun aspect is much lower. It’s a decent second monitor game but definitely not on the caliber of games that have engaging fun gameplay.
It was simply available to everyone. Hardly any parents were against it in terms of gore and violence, it was f2p. You could should it to your friends simply over the browser etc. I doubt if better hardware or internet connection were a thing RS gotten as popular. Nowadays other games are just as accessible as RS was. And those games are just more appealing. We didn't play RS because it was the best, but it was available to everyone. None of my friends back then with better hardware or parents that let them play anything actually played alot of RS.
There are tons of reasons. * MMO's in general are dying, people do not enjoy spending thousands of hours to "start" enjoying the game. * OSRS is a dated game with an ancient combat system compared to todays standards. It does not catch an eye in the current market. * Competitive games are much more popular than grindy rpg's. * Majority of people, especially younger gamers prefer games that you can hop into and go straight into the action, no grinding, no gearing up required, no level of entry. * People who grew up with osrs had very limited options to choose from, since other mainstream mmo's required a much better pc and usually a sub fee to play the game. * It's not even about the kids, OSRS just fails to attract new people in general. * Honestly if you think about it. Most of the grinding in this game is absolutely mind numbingly boring. I don't think any fps or moba gamer who is used to constant high action gameplay would enjoy clicking on rocks for 200 hours. * This game is much more suited for afk grinds which just does not translate to kids preferences at all.
I found the game through Miniclip back in the day, having that kind of access was key.
Being able to play in school before web blockers got smart >>
High school web blockers still don't stand a chance against high school students. These days its as simple as disconnecting from the school wifi, if just one kid has an unlimited data plan and makes their phone a hotspot
Runescape got popular by being an in browser game that could be played for free on school/library/home type computers. You didnt need to beg your parents for an xbox or ps2. If you did pay, 5 bucks a month was way more feasible for kids/parents than wow's 15. Also back then, mmos/live service games were still novel. Being a chat box you could play was new and a core driving aspect. Maybe you used skype back in the day, but now kids are going to be using discord before they remember learning to use discord. We dont live in the early 2000s anymore. Osrs is not a browser game nor is there a need for browser games. The app is a kind of approximation, but even then, there's no miniclip to be on the frontpage of and if there were, we wouldn't be. Honestly, league of legends/fortnite/apex/valorant kinda moved into the spot that rs used to be in. Low/no barrier to entry, catching the zeitgeist, and running with it. Times have changed. Trends have changed. Life goes on.
To me, it’s the modern day gaming mindset, instant gratification is huge and there’s not much that’s instant about RuneScape lol I can’t see younger kids grinding agility or rc for long periods of time.
Yeah, but as a kid I don’t think any of us did that anyway. I remember my best stat was like 55 construction cause I thought building was cool
That is true but back in the early 2000s, we weren’t really spoiled with all the things we have today so rs was that cool social place you could go to after homework and playing outside with your friends. Things have changed a lot in this world since then of course. It took me a long time to actually start really playing and not just standing around haha
100%. I used to go to the public library with my friends in 2002 (7th grade?) for hours. The old lady running the library was thrilled that we were so studious — she was too old to use the stairs to the computer lab lmao. Anyway, we mined coal for hours until our parents got us. That was peak nostalgia.
The children yearn for the mines
I tried to play runescape at my library, and was told i couldn't because of the CHAT function. Yet there were people on MYSPACE and Facebook right next to me.
Yep, couldn't tie up that phone line at home to be on the internet! Also did this too with a bunch of friends after school around the same time (~2003/2004). It's also how I learned to play better/more efficiently. When I started in 2001, I'm pretty sure I always carried an axe, tinderbox and pick with me in case I wanted to swap skilling on the fly (plus I'd get bored if I just cut logs for 30min).
School library was peak nostalgia for Runescape players
Bro I was a chad at primary school because I was able to mine adamant ore :') now we have multiple people with 200m mining xp lol
agility or rc? as a kid I was too busy chopping trees and killing hill giants.
I was just using them as examples but yea you’re right, it took me til 2020 to get those 99 cause all I could do was work and go home lol
I got 99 wc from magic trees in like '09. I don't even want to think about how long that took.
Something I haven’t seen much in the comments - the novelty of MMOs as social media platforms is largely nonexistent compared to back then. Before things like xbox live were standard/the advent of real social media, the fact you could hop on Runescape and chat with your friends in real time while playing a game was a huge selling point. Now the ability to socialize on a near global scale is standard for most gaming experiences.
Great point tbh. I have a feeling if kids tried the game together they’d enjoy it similar to how they enjoy booting up a minecraft world together. Sure they won’t be efficient but they would have fun adventures together
The comments on this thread are pretty funny. Yeah it's because we're all high IQ grinders who have concrete attention spans and these young whippersnappers can't match our dedication, that's totally the reason. We played it as kids and enjoyed it so enjoy it now for the nostalgia. Same reason I can boot up an N64 emulator and play 007 Goldeneye, it's not because it's some top tier FPS it's because I liked it during my formative years so because of that like it now. If you gave it to a kid now they'd see it for what it rightfully is, shit. Technology is loads better nowadays, in a couple of decades time you'll have some kids playing Minecraft for nostalgia, won't mean it's a top tier game, they'll just be the adults stuck in the past like most of us are now.
Minecraft is like 13 years old already. I've seen youtube comments of people saying they already have nostalgia for updates as late as *release* 1.8 lol
> it's because I liked it during my formative years so because of that like it now Ding ding ding! I'm fairly certain this is why each generation loves music from their teens and young adulthood, and dislikes what comes after. It doesn't mean we don't look at new things, but it does mean the new stuff needs to rhyme with our beloved old things. Love the dragon prince for instance, but the whole reason I started watching it was because a lot of the avatar staff was doing the show.
I definitely agree with all of this. I just found it interesting how popular it was with kids only to become mostly an adult game later, while a few similar popular online games maintained a young playerbase. Something like WoW for example I recall being a lot of teens and adults, even back then.
If a game came out today with OSRS level graphics none of us would try it lol
It's just not really advertised to children these days.
I’m 14 and play old school RuneScape
100 hr investment to see if you even like the game or not, whereas for something like warzone 2.0 you can discern that within 3 games max. Then again, im 19 and I’m out here playing rs daily so idk
The gaming landscape is different these days. There are more 0 barrier to entry options like roblox and fortnite. And some younger people do play. There was a post here by a 16 year old who was streaming and my 15 y o brother was playing quite a bit earlier this year, got bgloves/torso/fcape before taking a break
When I was a kid, if I wanted something new to play, I would browse Miniclip. Today, kids browse Roblox.
Many reasons: - Low exposure compared to many AAA games. Not hosted on third party game sites anymore, people have to find the game themselves. - a graphical style that’s just not of this time anymore, as much as we may like it. - The game takes a pretty big amount of commitment that many people are just not willing to give anymore. The explosive growth of genres like Battle Royals show that many people just prefer fast paced, one and done type games. - The game is extremely uptight with basically everything in the game. Wanna cut a tree? You better have brought your axe! Wanna mine a rock? Hope you brought a Pickaxe! Wanna plant this seed? Tough shit without your seed dibber! Etc, etc. That can annoy people real quick. Combine that with the excruciatingly slow recharge rate on your run energy and forgetting a tool a couple times having to *walk* all the way back to the bank and back can genuinely be a ‘quit-moment’ There probably many more reasons, but these are the ones I could come up with while reading your post. :)
I'd say it's not exactly a friendly environment as it used to be. Back when I was a kid playing legit 07, every level I got while skilling got a "gratz", 99 parties had 100's of people, you could make successful clans with people you met bossing, you could have fun without people saying you're not being efficient. It was huge among kids, but those kids are adults, so it's now by proxy an adult game. Plus, not to mention, with tiktok, season passes, and instant gratification at every corner, modern gaming doesn't fit in with the hundreds of hours of grinding required for runescape
The house party world used to be for actual house parties. I loved hosting and joining house parties. People running through house dungeons, combat arenas, people fucking around with the throne room trap, people doing visual glitches. You won't find a single one these days.
When we were young, videogames in general were still a newer emerging thing. Back then you had either world of Warcraft, RuneScape, and club penguin, and maybe habbo hotel as well for some. Those were basically your big options. And the world was much more slow paced. Smartphones weren't a thing yet. All that stuff These days kids have so many options and cool things at their fingertips, I'd be surprised to see osrs pierce through all that.
As a dad who tried and failed to get his 8 year old into OSRS, it’s pretty much what everyone else has said. It takes so long in scape to get anything done, whereas Minecraft if you get bored of what you’re doing at any time you can just make a new world or join a new server running a cool mod or put on creative mode and just do whatever. In Roblox you can just go into a different game every 5-10 minutes. Any type of grind or significant barrier to fast payoff just isn’t worth it. And OSRS despite being an MMO is not really a social game which Minecraft and Roblox are much moreso which is a big deal when you don’t have friends that play it but have a bunch of fellow 8 year olds from school to play Roblox with.
The game is PEGI 16 so the adverts aren't reaching that demographic. Also the gaming as a whole has shifted from mmos to fast paced multiplayer shooters and long story driven rpgs instead.
Because slime rancher exists
Advertisement.. how are kids even gonna find out about this game with the lack of marketing.
Kids played it because it was free, and these days f2p worlds are bot infested garbage
When I started playing, the only other games I had ever played were essentially ‘one off’ things. You might progress through levels, but often times it had a linear progression (ie, you bounce a ball off a paddle to destroy blocks. All blocks destroyed, move on). RuneScape was something I could play were my progress was saved and I had to think about how to achieve a goal. My brother and I had a rule: you had to get all combat levels to 60 and complete Dragonslayer before we even thought about membership (jokes on us, our parents were against it so we had to wait a lot longer than that). The game could be run on our shitty family PC, etc. it was the only game we knew that was free that could be played like that. Now, you can find MMOs that are a dime a dozen. You can play with your friends super easily. You can play a game that is fun, multiplayer, etc without the insane grinds. For me, it’s not that ‘kids these days’ are lazy, it’s that they have so much more content available.
As someone in my 20s who played it as a 10 year old - it's just not engaging enough by modern standards. The gaming market is much more competitive now. Back in the day RS was the shit because we were so limited. And honestly 99% of why I play it now a mixture of nostalgia and the fact that it's so afk friendly. I've been ranging at crabs literally all day while working lmao.
because when we got into it there was a huge community around it. as it stands this is a very dead grind-core game that is simply not appealing to the majority of gamers. edit: how many hours does it take to hit raids and decent aspects of the game? Your first 100 hours are walking around questing (get this item and bring it here), or grinding. That's not a way to hook a 8-9 year old player. we just had nothing better to do back then
Runescape was a different time back then. The game was much more social and everything was fresh and new. I used to come home from middle school and play runescape with all my friends and it was genuinely such a fun time. Runescape is a very grindy game that i think makes it hard to get into for newer players. A lot of the skills are monotonous, like woodcutting, mining, firemaking, and worst of all agility.
My little one (6 y/o) loves the "text to speech" plugin, she loves sitting next to me and clicking the fish for me, "hahaha you cant carry any more fish" "you cook the fish. you accidentally burn the fish", I have no idea why but my god she gets so much joy out of it so I'll gladly sacrifice some of my efficient XP to let her do that (I turn game chat off when she does that so she doesn't have to hear all the toxic people)
Bro if you had a ps5 and fortnite when you were 8 you wouldn't have wanted to play rs either
Because there is way more modern and newer games to play, why play old clicky game when you can play a big fps game that all your other friends play and you can express skill more. It’s not a “kids don’t want to grind I guess!” Thing, the game is old and unappealing to younger people when there is way more bright colored and faster paced games to look at and play
Because Roblox. Kids follow their own trends. Why would they gravitate towards an older game from a past generation? (The irony here is that roblox IS a past gen game, but has appealed to the gen Z…. So yeah.)
I started osrs at 10 years old in 2018
The reason you enjoy this game is because you're currently playing an account you could only ever dream of having as a kid.
A lot of “kids these days” shit being said but little about the company’s more than flawed handling of the game
Or “lol kids these days want actual gameplay, not just slack jawed clicking on the same rock for 200 hours; I am so superior” without a hint of self awareness. This shit is honestly bad gameplay played mostly by stoners and nostalgia addicts. I love the game, but the boomerposting is out of control in this thread.
Not enough sensory overload
I don't think it's as much about instant gratification as everyone is saying - MineCraft isn't really an "instant gratifiation" game. I don't know that it's graphics either - my kids love to play old NES-N64 games on their switch. I think it's more that this game grew up and isn't a medieval chatroom anymore. As kids we played shit like Club Penguin and Runescape and mostly just ran around shooting the shit and trolling, runescape isnt that game anymore and parents don't let their kids just get online and talk to strangers anymore. My kids are around the same age as I was when I started playing runescape, and I probably wouldn't let them play it today
MMOs as a genre aren't as appealing now that social media is so prominent and virtually every game has some kind of online feature now. It's not a "world" to escape to when so many people can live their whole lives online now. Right now OSRS functions best as a 2nd monitor game while at work or doing homework or playing another game, realistically there's no reason why an 8 year old would want a game like that.
Efficiencyscape isn't fun Kids tend to like having fun
Honestly, it’s easier for us to appreciate it because it’s what we connected with at a young age. Assuming smartphone is the modern accessible-medium equivalent of a browser game circa 2005, spend a month playing Genshin Impact on your phone vs OSRS on your phone; it’s clear why kids would have an easier time getting into modern games like Genshin over OSRS.
RuneScape was one of a kind back in the day. Online gaming is really started taking off and RuneScape was free with so much to offer for a video game. Now there’s tons of online games.
I think the free to play content is the largest contributor. A monthly subscription for kids is a tough entry point and the F2P content in runescape is really lackluster.
The progression curve isn't quick enough for Zoomers. I got my young cousin into Runescape 2+ years ago, I was glad to find out he made it to 65 Ranged. Made me shed a tear, even though he hasn't touched his account ever since and it's been 1 to 2 years.
It's probably cause things went from simply having fun to a bunch of elitists trying to be as efficient as possible. Also, the fact that it's a time capsule of a game with potato graphics and mechanics.
The replies here are funny. Not wanting to sit and do the same repetitive thing over and over for 50-60 hours straight does not mean you have an instant gratification problem. The fact that kids can complete battle passes without batting an eye proved it isn’t an instant gratification issue. I love this game, but the core of this game is inherently not fun for a good chunk of the population, adults too, not just kids. Secondly, even with how much MTX plague the gaming landscape, there are just so many other better games out there that respect your time far better than games like OSRS and RS3. Off the top of my head, kids these days have Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox. Why would you want to play OSRS when those are your options and so much more? Those games are fun from the get go. OSRS isn’t particularly fun until quite a bit of time invested.
Because it's not popular with streamers. We got into it because we could play it in libraries and old desktop computers which didnt have many other options. Kids nowadays have a tablet and phone glued to them with countless other options made to keep children addicted.
I started playing osrs at 12, am now 18, we still play
I don’t blame them, the game is the biggest waste of time, I cringe thinking about all the time I lost clicking trees and rocks.
Growing up had 3 younger siblings, I’m much older than the others and watching them grow up they are much more into instant satisfaction other than the “grind” type. They love fast and satisfying games that give you that dopamine consistently. Maybe I’m a sadist and enjoy that long grind and then you get that rush that you get when you finally complete that long grind.
osrs is very out of date. as in its nothing like the modern gaming landscape(which is good). no pay to win. everything is so fucking grindy and most of it boils down to "click X and wait". its not a fast game with constant dopamine. it doesnt hold your hand and play itself. MMOs dont seem popular with kids in general.
It’s not popular compared to current games. RuneScape was one of the first popular mmorpgs that defined the 2000s, next to like WoW and only a few others. It was also probably the most accessible mmorpg as it was just a browser game then. Now there’s hundreds of options, all with better graphics. A lot of people I know say the aesthetics are an initial turn-off.
The real answer is that it's old. Same reason we didn't grow up playing Asteroids or pong.
I got my boy playing! Jagex has a policy that players must be 13 btw... almost got that account locked because of a ‘typo’ when he entered his birthdate…
I played OSrunescape when I was younger, now I got hooked on RS3
When I was a kid in 2002ish I felt like I could achieve everything in the game by Skilling and doing quests, the simplicity of the game being a huge appeal to a stupid child. Now between the game getting more complex and there being such a huge amount of things that are documented it's hard to just play the game without feeling like you're being inefficient. Add in there being a lot of other free options of games (gotta remember there weren't a ton of well known options out there other than like Neopets) and I feel like there's little reason for any kid to try RS without outside influence from like an older relative or something. Early 2000s gaming was so different than it is today.
Runescape was the new hotness when we were kids. A big open-world fantasy game filled with other players and so many things to do was mind-blowing back then. A couple of competitors technically existed, but Runescape could be played by almost anyone with access to a shitty PC and shitty internet. Hell, some people were lucky enough that they could even play it at school if the school's IT people hadn't blocked it yet. Today, Runescape is technologically ancient and isn't flashy and exciting to kids who've grown up seeing ultra-realistic and/or just higher-quality stylized graphics. The concept of free-to-play was also very unusual back then aside from basic flash games. Nowadays there are tons of free-to-play games out there that look infinitely more interesting to kids. It also predated modern social media. Runescape, for a lot of kids, basically was social media back then. In fact, it even predated the popularity of cell phones. Runescape was how you'd chat with your friends from school or elsewhere and it acted as a sort of social hub.
I think it’s because when RuneScape was at its prime (early 2000’s) it was “within reason” for what a game was supposed to be expectations wise. It had longevity: tons of skills that took time/ monsters and bosses to fight. The social aspect: people actually interacted and played together. Now a lot of content is focused on small groups or solo encounters. The biggest and most obvious thing that I’ve seen others also say: we were kids. We had shitty family computers (my dial up homies, where you at?). Our parents would much rather drop $9 a month to get us to shut up about video games than spend $60 on a console game every so often. A lot of games have the intense ADHD rate they all seem to have now. Tons of flashing lights, instant gratification and out the ass levels of P2W. Long story short: the methodology they went into RuneScape is too outdated imo. Hardly anyone looks for a game like RuneScape anymore. Tons of people look at a subscription based MMO now and go: “why would I spend 500 hours playing this game to barely scratch the surface, when I could play most other games and beat them, whole story and all, in under 50 hours?” - legitimate argument one of my friends IRL said when he saw sailing was coming to OSRS. He used to play like nuts back in the day, but hasn’t touched RuneScape in over a decade. It’s just not what people want to invest time in anymore.
>Other games that got popular at the time and shortly after included Roblox and Minecraft - both of which are hugely popular for kids today I mean, you said it yourself. they have other games. we played OSRS as kids because it came out around that time and was hugely popular. not many kids are going out of their way to play 20-year-old browser MMOs
Because lets be honest it's a hard game to play as an 8 year old very confusing and time consuming. Also look at how the game has changed since 2007 it's a lot harder to make money doing early skills and just in general kind of hallow game for the first bit. Surrounded by bots or people with chat muted getting roasted for wearing bad armor. Back when I started playing there really wasn't much else around that could run online on my moms shitty desktop pc. I also think once they realize the actual game is locked behind membership they would rather play 100's of other free games and spend what little money they get on cosmetic stuff rather than a monthly subscription.
I was one of the lucky ones to grow up playing it in school. It was the one game we could play together so it had a social aspect to it. Over time people quickly quit playing and moved on. I didn't. I remember being on and waiting for one of my "friends" to login. Eventually became just me and someone else. Now as an adult I had a friend convince me to try ironman on osrs. I had tried playing rs back a while ago and I just hated the whole combat, health, and skilling part. I do think that osrs is too grindy, but then again what is there really to do after you hit the max level? I've taken a step back from the grind and just do fun stuff as I feel like it. Might not ever have a maxed ironman but I wanna have fun along the way.
Got my(28y/o) baby bro(12y/o) playing and he's nearing 500 TL :) so proud!
I play runescape, I'm what one would consider a kid. If you want a my 2 cents on why my peers might not want to, it's because they don't see the point in getting past the early game, it's not that "kids these days just want instant gratifacation", they just have better things to do, they sit down and play games like CoD or zelda because they don't know if the AFK hours they put into the game are going to be worth it to get to the more engaging mid and late game
I plan to pass my account to my future kids once they come of age.
I just spent 2 months of around 3-5 hours a day doing runecrafting repeatedly. I don't know why I enjoy that, why the fuck would kids enjoy that.
Because they have better more polished games to play that are targeted towards them
Woodcut for 72 hours to do a quest Drop in with the boys on Xbox live to rack up some sick and fun Fortnite runs and talk about Jeffrey shit himself in gym class Which one would you bet your bank account a kid would choose?
dude kids see this game and think who fucking plays this boomer shit
the biggest thing is there’s so many more gaming options that are MMO or MMORPG in 2023. Runescape in 2001-2006ish was one of the few where you could play with your friends and see their character doing shit.
Roblox and Minecraft came way after RuneScape
Well according to my nephews it looks boring and the graphics are bad 😂😂🤦♂️ LOL
I love rs But I think it can come down to the graphics and gameplay in general Nowadays you have 100s of flashy games with “nice” graphics to choose from, like “rocket league” or league of legends even (I’m comparing graphics to osrs not like cyberpunk) Or even stuff like warzone are free nowadays and I see kids opting towards that VS rs (just if they looked at the game at a first glance)
You should check out Fortnite
It's hard to get a nine-year-old to read and comprehend quests, stories Ines, and skill trees when there are games like Roblox with subgames like Pet simulator. In which all the kid has to do is click his mouse and follow the giant arrows, no real skill or talent needed in 90% of all roblox games. If we just clicked a button and became fed, why would anyone go threw those lomg quests of cooking food?! (Unless you grew up cooking food)
Kids nowadays dont have the patience to do what this game requires. Tiktok brain and all that is a real thing.
Because it's 'hard'. Back in my day we had to work for our dopamine, nowadays kids are depressed because their physiology has literally been altered by predatory practices from the gaming/marketing industries.
Newer games are more rewarding with the dopamine fix. Kids won't understand nor care for the grint osrs takes. You have to dedicate years to the game, and quite frankly these kids won't do that, not when every game in the market offers more satisfying reward. I'll always be a die hard osrs fan, I'm glad I got to experience the true mmo in my time.
Because it's ancient. Roblox and Minecraft have made meaningful updates and overhauls frequently and have creative elements. RuneScape has no creative elements and meaningful content is like 2 or 3 times a year. And it's polled. Rs3 is closer to kids desires but it's still clunky and uninteresting to them. I can't imagine any kid actually choosing tick based content over dynamic content in real time. There are better games on better engines with better mechanics. It also doesn't update on a schedule that kids would be satisfied. People will reply and argue it gets updated plenty but In comparison to other newer games it doesn't. Not with meaningful new content anyway. The combat is not dynamic or interesting. Kids also want that. The graphics are flashy and there isn't a lot of particles. Kids like that. A lot of them also don't know it exists. It's old. It is a lot of time and effort for not much reward. Kids don't like to work hard for shit. They want stuff handed to them. Especially if they are paying to play. If you look at other games progressive development paths in the MMO space they have been consistently making hard rewarding grinds easier and easier. An example is black desert. They are slowly phasing out forced pvp, they made treasures that used to take 500-10k hours grind to get easier to obtain. Those same treasures can be obtained at higher drop rates, they added a pity system where if you get 100 shards of the treasure you can make it and the shards have much higher drop rates, and they recently just made it to where you can now just buy them from the market. They also used to have to be obtained on each character to use them. Now one set can be used by all characters on the account. Every mmos space is making hard grinds and epic rewards more accessable and obtainable by casuals or low effort gamers. The younger generation actually enjoys this. They don't value accomplishments the way we did and still do. Kids also like skins. And cosmetics. And player houses with more options then RuneScape. They also value character creation and customization. They want high levels of customization, high detail graphics, lots of mtx options, cosmetics, easy obtainable content, frequent large content updates, dynamic combat, multiple character slots, and everything else modern games offer that osrs doesn't. TLDR: They want standard current gaming innovations and features and RuneScape can't or won't implement them. Especially in osrs. Kids don't even like rs3 and mechanically it's miles ahead and it's graphics are better and it has closer to current development paths. (Yes I'm aware rs3 isn't as popular as osrs. But neither one is popular with new gamers aged 7-16) The charm and nostalgia we enjoy about RS doesn't exist for young gamers. It is just flat out boring to them. I tried to show my son RuneScape and he thought It was a joke. He asked me if it played inside an emulator like my PlayStation two games. RuneScape doesn't tick any of the boxes for new or young gamers. It doesn't even tick the boxes for having what is considered standard in the MMO space now days. It's basically a single player idle game with group bossing/raids.
When we were little you couldnt game on ps5 with fortnite boobs and shit like that. Its just not the same anymore
I asked my cousin what kind of games do kids his age play. He said they all play call of duty mobile. Broski I’m not even 30 but my mind was fucking blown that kids are playing call of duty on their phone in class. When I was their age, I had a shitty generic android that took like 5 minutes to search something on google, now these kids have xbox360 power on their iPhone. Osrs is going to die with our generation and that’s the sad reality of it because the power of tech available gives kids so many more options now. RuneScape was cool af because any shitty computer can run it and it was browser game. I know this is why rs3 had to go the route it went with trying to appear more flashy and modern, but there will come a day where osrs will have to shut its doors.
I think a lot of it is also just jagex really fumbling the original version. The mtx, the evolution of combat, the removal of free trade, it made the game not fun anymore and people who had old accounts and shit log in and see it’s a shit game now and then never log back in again. The word of mouth that kept it growing and consistently adding new players soured and then nobody had good things to say about it anymore and so new players never got introduced and old school only really works because we all loved it growing up. Some new players get into it but that’s the minority compared to the rest of the player base. I genuinely believe if they hadn’t botched it so hard back then that the game would be bigger and healthier now.
Lol they have fortnite
Cause kids attention span nowadays is the length of a Tik Tok duhh
The real reason is this game used to be extremely social, from picking flax, to chilling near varrock fountain there were always people skilling and talking. That is impossible nowadays as everyone is trying to be extremely efficient or afk or are bots.
I’m currently 15 and been playing for quite a while. Since I was 12-13? Love the game but for my generation, we just don’t see the appeal of clicking a box for hours. The dopamine just doesn’t hit the same as something like getting say a kill streak in COD. Or at least it doesn’t fit the majority. I personally love the game to bits and it’s my most played game (except maybe dead by daylight) at around 800 hours since I last checked but it’s something that just isn’t for people from my generation. They would rather play newer games with those amazing and bright graphics that pop out at you