So I heard the news today that the developers of RuneScape have now made their game available to the French speaking player-base to add to their already established English and German servers.

Created back in 2001, I dare say for many of us this was our original introduction to the wonderful world of MMORPG. And of course its hard to forget a game immortalised as the world-wide most popular free-to-play MMO.

It is indeed an interesting move to open the game to the French speaking public. Since the release in February 2007 of the German servers, 5 have been made available located within Finland and Sweden. With previous claims that the game was planned to be rolled out to the Asian and Eastern European market, I wonder if further announcements like this one will be made in the near future, or whether this is simply an attempt to pull in more users due to declining interest.

With a drop in subscriptions in late 2007 after a game update by the developers, Jagex, I am keen to see the attrition rate of the player base in the near future. With other free-to-play games popping out of the woodwork with more varied content, I can envisage maintaining the subscription levels previously witnessed as rather hard. That said, there are still those of us who dust off our Spectrum or Amiga occasionally, so maybe RuneScape will prevail and continue to be a classical favourite…who knows!