Jagex
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| Jagex Games Studio | |
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Video game industry |
| Founded | 28 April 2000 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | St John's Innovation Centre, Cambridge, England |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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Phil Mansell (CEO & COO) |
| Products | |
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Number of employees
|
 480+ (2015) |
| Parent |
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| Website | jagex |
Jagex Limited, doing business as Jagex Games Studio (commonly referred to as Jagex), is a British video game developer and publisher based at the St John's Innovation Centre in Cambridge, England. It is best known for RuneScape, the world's largest free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The company's name comes from its original slogan, "Java Gaming Experts". In addition to RuneScape, Jagex has released multiple casual games on its FunOrb portal, as well as other titles. By 2015, the studio held over 480 employees. In June 2016, Jagex were acquired by Chinese company Hongtou, which in turn was acquired by another Chinese company, Zhongji Holding, in September 2016.
After initially creating the Jagex name and logo for their projects, brothers and computer programmers Andrew Gower and Paul Gower began trading under the Jagex name in 1999, describing Jagex Software as a "small software company based in England who specialise in producing top-quality Java-games for webpages." That same year they began work on the MMORPG RuneScape, which was released in January 2001. In December 2001, Andrew Gower, Paul Gower, and Constant Tedder launched Jagex in its current incarnation, with Tedder as its CEO. Jagex formally acquired the Jagex name from Andrew Gower in 2001.
RuneScape grew dramatically; one year after its release over a million free accounts had been registered. The game was originally supported by advertisements, however, the Dot-com bubble meant that there were fewer advertisers willing or able to sign with Jagex. One of the first tasks of the new company was to create a paid version of the game with extra features, to support hosting costs and continued development. This was achieved on 27 February 2002 when the pay-to-play version of RuneScape was released. It gained 5,000 subscribers in the first week, making it one of the largest Java pay-to-play games in the world at the time.
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Wikipedia