The collective unconscious of the RS3/OSRS playerbase is roughly 2-3 months behind where it would be if more people followed aggrgtr.
Points showing up later on Reddit are often things I had clarified months prior.
In February, I wrote that RS3 player count was still trending flat. I was making a gentle argument that player counts were not showing lift from the recent updates, and that the data were also showing a slight downtrend, which I was roasted for.
About three months later, a different user posted monthly active players from February 2014 to April 2026, which dramatically showed that player counts were declining based on hiscores data. It is the same idea and same data, but presented more starkly: not as merely a flat trend with my boring analysis, but as a steep declination. When it was safer to discuss this topic, it was seen as very popular.
In April, I posted on Reddit that OSRS player counts were 80K+ higher than normal. I was discussing player counts, people saying they were quitting, and the riots, with the parallel being that player counts were now much higher than they had been previously, which belied the idea that people were quitting because of membership prices. I then posted Why Jagex will never take rioting seriously in one chart, again discussing player counts and the large number of people online versus what people were saying.
Now, on June 4, there is a new thread, which has since been deleted, saying OSRS player count has dropped 30% since the start of the year, and it received widespread approval (1K Upvotes!). The user was discussing the drop in player counts and also posted, "And yet, that massive margin is still not enough for the owners... They demand more!"
Some of the analysis by that poster might be fair, but the idea that people are quitting because of membership prices is not correlated with what the data show. The idea that membership prices have driven the decrease in player counts is simply wrong.
We can look at a few other convergent/divergent datapoints to see how they trend.
If players did not want to pay more money for RuneScape, why was Leagues an increase of 90K-100K more players on average, and why did it set new highs? Leagues VI was a members-only mode. As I showed in Jagex Raised Membership to $15; OSRS Players Responded by Paying $1.4M, the Leagues worlds alone represented roughly $1.4 million in one-month membership-equivalent value.
If people are unwilling to pay for RuneScape, why are they paying for RS?
Bot/RWT ban data more directly correlate with the real cause. OSRS F2P was roughly 20% of the OSRS population before the bot bans. Now it is under 10%.
Jagex has put real pressure on bots and real-world traders. Botters who used to brag openly and talk to people like SirPugger about their inner workings are now very mum. Something has changed, and that is what the data are showing.
The playerbase is consistently wildly uninformed and months late to the party.
That is one of the reasons why I started this site. It is hard to believe what others are saying without evidence, especially when people can be so confidently wrong.