Welcome to New World. This new MMO is helmed by Amazon OSRS Gold, a company with horrific violations of worker rights and an indefensibly wealthy CEO. It already costs $40 to get started, and then microtransactions are added on top of that. In all likelihood, RuneScape established the live service model years before major players got on board, but all of its rivals have copied the idea.

"It really wasn't making any profits, but we'd done a lot of work at this point that there were so many players who were playing the game," said Andrew Gower in one of the book's numerous interviews. "It was exciting to see 2,000 or even 3,000 players playing the game simultaneously, a lot of players on the forums and how much they loved RuneScape. I just would like to continue making it. It was enjoyable even if it didn't make a profit".

This is why we decided to let the free membership be left in place - they didn't want to turn off the members. And as we know, it was a success, as its popularity only grew. However, as The First 20 Years explains, RuneScape didn't reach its highs without a few hiccups along the way.

Many of us who played the game religiously in the 2000s would probably struggle with the initial release, now known as RuneScape Classic. It was possible to fight anyone and even against each other. The graphics were not basic Cheap RS Gold. It could only accommodate around 1,200 players at a time without crashing.