The overall trend for concurrent player counts is decreasing. About two weeks ago, I made a post on Reddit labeling the trend flat, and also later admitted it was flat and slightly down. Yes, this was noticeable two weeks ago.

There is a YoY pattern of player growth between October and December that declines afterward. This is seasonality. Many players log in for holiday content (or new content drops); since 2020, the Oct-to-Dec surge has averaged around 24% in years where it occurred. But those players give those counts all back in 2-3 months, every time. This year's holiday surge was only about 4%, compared to 25-34% in the two prior years. RS3's seasonality is especially conspicuous on the hiscores counts, where monthly active accounts have gone from ~370K (Aug 2023) to ~288K (Jan 2026), with February currently at ~216K. So suggesting that player counts would drop this time of year without new content wasn't a wild leap. A bigger leap was the folks saying one outlier day in January was indicative of the game coming back. Those folks are really quiet right now.

So what's driving lower numbers? Several things:

These YoY trends are predictable. You can see the slope decreasing from the peak back during COVID, and this can be mapped YoY (I've done it on the Trends page). Assuming that trajectories hold, Jagex wouldn't want to keep losing players, so they make adjustments: new skills, new areas, new minigames, new content.

Jagex is clearly experienced at monitoring these trends considering how far ahead they implemented the roadmap for these changes (last summer). But again, a blind man could see the ongoing downtrend since COVID and rightly expect it to continue.

I believe 120 combat levels and Havenhythe will bring people back, if Jagex executes well.

I've added a lot more data, including Player Support, which tracks the botting data that Jagex releases. I don't have a programmatic solution for that yet, so it's completely manual until next month.

I redid the labels on the weekly data tooltips for hiscores because, for Jagex, a new week starts on Wednesday (or Tuesday for me). The data was always correct; the labels just weren't accurate because I had the week starting on Monday. The reason the data is correct is because Jagex does a weekly summation that drops on Wednesday.

Just some transparency on how the process works: I collect three data streams: monthly, weekly, and live. Live gives accurate counts, but Jagex adjusts them when the final data dump comes in. I overwrite live data with the final figures from Jagex so the counts are as accurate as possible. Even still, I have seen some data that don't match month over month because it seems Jagex can revise old data somehow? (Maybe bot bans.)

The RS3 Time of Day and Day of Week trend views for YoY comparison have become the two things I review the most, because I can easily see whether today is trending low compared to the last three months, or whether the day is low compared to all of the data. This gives me a quick read on the game's level of engagement at any given moment.

Last thing: I want to add links to some historical data, and maybe callouts to data sources in case people want to review those themselves. I would also like to pull in social media data on RuneScape, but the Reddit API has been tricky to obtain. Might keep trying, might not. I was also thinking about getting Jagex's financials and graphing those, but may not do that either.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the site. There are some quality-of-life changes I might try in the future, such as making graphs linkable and shareable.

Finally, THANK YOU to everyone who has been SHARING the site with positive intent. I really appreciate that.