The developer has enjoyed great success with RuneScape

Emilylowes

Who was there: Mark Gerhard is the chief executive officer of free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing developer Jagex, based in Cambridge, UK. The developer OSRS gold has enjoyed great success with RuneScape, which holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest free-to-play MMORPG. The company is now also moving into mobile games.

What he said: Gerhard's Develop session was accompanied by the announcement of the company's latest game. Stellar Dawn will be a sci-fi MMORPG, due for release in 2011, and will be the studio's biggest game to date, according to Gerhard. The title is currently entering the final stages of development, and a closed beta will be made available ahead of release.

Gerhard's lecture, though, was dedicated to explaining the company's road to success. He recounted approaching big publishers to see if they'd be interested in Jagex's free-to-play business model. "We went to EA and said we've got amazing free games, and they said,  he explained. "We went back and said we've got a million players and they said  he continued. "The necessity turned us into a publisher," he said, explaining his decision to self-publish as a result.

Despite the success of RuneScape and the overall growth of the company in general, Gerhard claimed that, "2010 will be a pretty flat year for us financially". "That's OK--we're building games that become an institution," he explained, elaborating on his long-term view to games publishing. "Free should mean free…[but] our most ardent fans will always pay for value-added content."

Another of the key themes of his talk was his approach to human resources and the significant investment the company makes in developing its staff. "We have a learning lab--all our competitors' SDKs are there. We find that roughly 10 percent of our industrial placements decide to write content for themselves, and that's the acid test because that's the passion project. We'll then invest in them further." Again, a long-term plan is key to this approach. "You have to Buy RuneScape gold make sure your employee retention is 100 percent if you're making this sort of investment," he said.