alt Hacker NewsI don't understand how RuneScape managed to get the traction it did. 2004 was the same year World of Warcraft came out!
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It was free to play when that wasn’t a popular financial model for games at the time. The memberships were also much cheaper than WoW and accepted different payment methods that would be more available to minors at the time.
It's free and you could play it in the school library, for one. Also it came out a few years before WoW.
As a kid, I didn't have a computer that could run WoW, nor would I have been able to convince my parents to pay for the subscription. I suspect most of the popularity was from kids in a similar situation, probably playing it on library computers when they should've been studying.
MapleStory was also quite popular back then for similar reasons.
Besides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.
They were two very different games and target audiences, with the incidental commonality that both are MMOs.
in addition to what others said...
2004 runescape, now "old school runescape", which is actually successor 2001 Runescape "Classic", were both playable in a browser.
and my (parent's) PC couldn't even install, let alone run WoW. despite me trying with all my might.
so I'm sure I wasn't alone.
it was absolutely magical to me.
The other comments hit the big ones (didn't have to download, had a free tier, didn't have significant irreversible character choices, had meaningful solo or quasi-social activities, etc), but I think a major contributing factor was it appearing on miniclip.