RuneScape: Dragonwilds Crushes Early Access with 600,000+ Sales

Well, well, well — look who's breathing serious fire this month.

RuneScape: Dragonwilds just dropped into Early Access and, in its first week, it sold over 600,000 copies on Steam. For a spin-off of a 23-year-old free-to-play MMO? That’s a straight-up W.

Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy spilled the tea over on LinkedIn, calling the launch a bigger success than even they had hoped for.

"The response from players, the RuneScape community, and the industry so far has exceeded even our most hopeful expectations," Bellamy said. "It’s the alchemy of this industry."

The numbers don't lie:

• Over 13,000 player reviews with an 85% "Very Positive" rating.
• Peak concurrent players hovering around 50,000 for multiple days.
• #1 spot on Steam’s global top sellers list.
• #3 most-watched game on Twitch during launch week.
• Average session time? Over two hours per player.

Pretty wild for a surprise drop, especially in a genre (crafting survival RPGs) that's more crowded than a Lumbridge chicken farm. By the way, we recorded the game's appearance in Steam Early Access just recently. It's nice to watch games develop before our eyes.

From the Mind of Jagex: Into Development

If you know anything about Jagex, you know they're not exactly the "churn out spin-offs every year" type. RuneScape has been their bread, butter, and entire kitchen since 2001. So when they decided to step outside the MMORPG world and make a survival RPG, they didn’t just re-skin an existing project. Dragonwilds has been in development quietly for over three years, built by a dedicated internal team that reportedly mixed veterans from the original RuneScape days with fresh talent.

A lot of the core systems in Dragonwilds — crafting, exploration, base-building — started from scratch, but they didn’t throw away what made RuneScape special: the wonky charm, the goofy but lovable medieval fantasy vibe, and that signature slow-burn grind.

Where many survival games feel brutal and punishing (looking at you, Valheim), Dragonwilds is more about steady progress and exploration-first gameplay. It’s got that same cozy, "just one more thing" loop that old-school RuneScape nailed decades ago.

How Dragonwilds Stands Out Against Survival Giants

We’re living in a golden age of survival-crafting games, so Dragonwilds didn’t just have to be good — it had to be different.

Basically, where other survival games go hard into punishing players or layering on complex tech trees, Dragonwilds says:

"What if you just... had fun building stuff, killing goblins, and exploring?"

It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s just trying to make the wheel feel like home again.

Why This Matters (Beyond Just Nostalgia)

It would have been easy — so easy — for Jagex to screw this up. They could’ve cashed in on RuneScape nostalgia with a half-baked product, and people probably would’ve bought it anyway. Instead, they dropped a genuinely fun, fresh entry into a genre that honestly needed a bit more whimsy and weirdness.

Not every legacy dev gets this lucky (ask anyone still waiting for a good new Ultima or EverQuest spin-off). But Jagex respected their own history while actually innovating within a genre that’s gotten a little stale.

Two Dragoccino please!

If you’re burnt out on hardcore survival games that punish every mistake, or if you just miss the goofy, heartwarming spirit of old MMOs, you might want to give Dragonwilds a shot. It’s still Early Access, so expect a few bugs here and there — but the foundation is strong, the vibes are immaculate, and the future updates look stacked.

And for once, it feels like an industry veteran actually stuck the landing instead of just mining nostalgia for a quick buck. RuneScape’s roots are deep, and Dragonwilds proves they can still grow something new and surprising.

Want a full beginner’s guide to Dragonwilds next? I’ve been chopping trees and punching dragons all week.