RuneScape’s Jagex is apparently being sold yet again, this time to a private equity firm for over $1B

February 6, 2024 10:30 AM

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: RuneScape company Jagex is for sale yet again.

Back in September, we first caught the rumor that Jagex’s current presumptive owner, the Carlyle Group, was considering selling Jagex off, seeking in the neighborhood of $1.2B US in the trade. Apparently, that’s now firmed up to be a lot more than a rumor, as Sky News is reporting that Carlyle is now enmeshed in “exclusive negotiations” to sell the games company for £900m, roughly $1.13B US, to CVC Capital Partners. CVC, a private equity firm that apparently invests broadly in international sports and IPs, beat out “a number of rival bidders” and is expected to “sign a formal agreement to buy a controlling stake in the company within days.”

“During the Jagex sale process, a number of private equity firms were said to have expressed uncertainty about the company’s business plan and development pipeline, denting hopes of it achieving a reported £1bn valuation,” Sky News says in what is surely the most important line in the entire piece as it’s a bit of an eyebrow-raiser that the company has doubled in value in four years.

Readers will surely know that Jagex is the UK studio behind RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, though most of its other MMO ventures have winked out of existence before launch. And Jagex has been sold repeatedly over the last decade; this will make its fourth sale since 2016, when it was valued at just $300M. Indeed, the last sale was heavily disputed in Chinese and UK courts, and as we’ve chronicled, the drama around these sales has become a story unto itself, generating everything from a RICO lawsuit to a bribery-related death sentence for one executive in China.