What do you think has kept RuneScape going for so long

What do you think has kept  Runescape Gold  going for so long, and consistently popular, in the often quite mercurial world of free-to-play browser-based games?
I think it’s a number of things, most games today are run like standalone products: they’re produced, launched, and given minimal customer support and as a result, they have a negative parabolic curve: it’s popular, then its unpopular, and then players move on to something else.
RuneScape, however, has very much been run as a service. By treating RuneScape as an evolving experience, players constantly feel like they are playing something fresh and new every time they log in. So RuneScape should be seen as a game with ten years’ worth of content and updates rather than a ten year old game.
Furthermore, we make a point of listening and talking to our community, which has played a critical role in our success and longevity. Our community understand that we’re not a fly-by-night operation, we’re not just investing in this game for 2 or 3 years, we have a long term plan for RuneScape and intend to support the game for the next decade and beyond. I think that this is particularly important for MMORPGs. As you’re asking players to invest a lot of time and effort into an entertainment experience, they need to know that their investment will pay back and still be there in 5/10 years time.
The 200,000,000 number is for user accounts over the course of the life of RuneScape – how many people are playing RuneScape now?
Millions of players log into the RuneScape every day. Our peak times are in the evenings and weekends; however, due to the time zones around the world there are often hundreds of thousands of people playing at any one time.
What kind of infrastructure do you need to keep RuneScape running – in terms of server setup etc?
We have our own infrastructure, which we have developed in-house. This infrastructure is cloud-based, but it’s our own proprietary technology and we have what we call “super pops”, which are massive data centres, with significant carrier class bandwidth. They act as our proxy servers around the world.
RuneScape is run on commodity hardware. All our own proprietary web serving technologies, file systems, databases etc. have allowed us incredible scale and tremendously high margins because they are so efficient. I think we’re probably the most efficient game in terms of infrastructure and servers costs in the entire industry. Which is great when it comes to scale, because that’s what MMOs are all about.
Do you have a sense of the geographical distribution of RuneScape players? I know you talked about expanding into India, and there are native-language RuneScape’s in Europe – how many languages can RuneScape be played in?
There are RuneScape players in more than 150 countries around the world and the game can be played in 4 languages. The majority of our players are still largely using the English version (probably more than 90%), and are mainly located very much in the western hemisphere. So, obviously we’re looking at Northern America and Western Europe as you’d expect. That said, we have plans to extend our focus towards Asia over time.
[This is interesting: I was talking with an industry figure last week who noted with incredulity that, by not having a way to offer The Old Republic as free-to-play, EA had effectively counted out the Eastern market, where subscription fees fly even less well than the West. An MMO which has always been free to play actually has an interesting advantage here.]
Like most F2P MMOs, presumably, RuneScape has a broad base of free players, a smaller number of members and an even smaller number of members who make regular purchases on top of the subscription fee. Can you give a sense of how the RuneScape user base breaks down?
We don’t have whales in the same way that Zynga do, where one or two percent of their player population pay enormous amounts of money. The breakdown of free players to members is  rs 3 gold roughly 70/30, so the most common form of payment is a small monthly payment to gain access to premium content.