How is your plan to enlarge to consoles progressing

Faced with this kind of boosting popularity, Develop stays down with company CEO Mark Gerhard to discuss the company's plans for RS gold growth, and the potential of the free-to-play model itself. Jagex is referred to as a pioneer of complimentary to-play games, but gets got the version itself attained the levels of popularity many had expected it to? I believe we've. After we started out the entire business was fixated on classic retail supply, and nobody really understood the free-to-play version, or even the online model. Now we see the complete reverse, with a few of the biggest names in gaming wanting to do what we do. Many businesses aren't quite following our very own version. If we look at a few of the businesses which have tried to copy what we do, like Sony and Free Realms, these companies are releasing a free demo for the membership part and ridding component of this game.

We feel that the Jagex version, and certainly Runescape, is different to this. We have published a comprehensive free game for our fans. Just to give you a sense of scale, the free game has over 13,500 hours of gameplay to it; we understand this because that's how long that our most-dedicated free-to-play player has spent the game up to now, and that individual has still not maxed out all her abilities. So people have noticed that the free-to-play model works, but typically companies implement it in the wrong manner, and just offer a few hours of free play. As a consequence of this, our competitors have not seen the success that we've, and I guess they likely won't.

I believe something we've been really true to during is that we have two separate games; a free game along with a members' game. For your most ardent lovers, membership is the only alternative, but for all those not paying we wish to make certain people have access to a self-sustained game, not a demonstration. I had discovered that 60 percent of Runescape was for members only. We look at the entire game as a globe. A mass the size of the Americas is totally free, but obviously there are other continents available for members only. The free-to-play game has 25 quests, the members' version has 150. So yes it is considerably larger from this aspect.

How is your plan to enlarge to consoles progressing? Before we talked to various stage holders we did some research ourselves to see whether our propositions can theoretically work -- which obviously saves a lot of time. We now have working proof of theories on a few of our products, and unique pieces of our matches on various systems. Which one we proceed with is another matter altogether; do we place that MMO on this games, do we place all them on another -- all of these are questions that we have to think about.

We're a games studio and tech company above everybody else. Of our 400 staff, about 250 are technical, and that's because we build our own tools for whatever we need. We do a load of R&D, and the challenge for us if we can write a software package that could take our code and then output it to a C# version for the buy rsgp paypal 360, Wii and PS3.

Runescape can support various different languages