There are a couple of companies in the MMORPG industry that just cannot seem to keep starting new MMOs and failing, all while bleeding the core game that created their nest egg. RuneScape company Jagex actually used to be one of them, having flubbed everything from Stellar Dawn and Transformers Universe to Block N Load and 8Realms. But now, in the wake of Jagex’s fourth corporate sell-off in eight years and the installation of new CEO Jon Bellamy, the company apparently plans to double down on RuneScape.

“The thing we do really well is maintaining the RuneScape games and governing their communities,” says Bellamy. “That’s exactly what we plan to do for the next five years. If we’re known as the RuneScape company, I think that’s something to be proud of, and it won’t be changing.”

Bellamy’s comments come via a GIbiz interview that sheds a bit more light on his ascension; he was actually a venture capital advisor first deployed by one of Jagex’s current owners to better understand what they were buying. He’s been fairly contentious since taking over, as he began his reign by canceling popular dev-led Pride content, something he continues to try to justify here by suggesting that “the world has changed a bit and the environment is different.” Yeah.

Where he is likely an improvement over his predecessor is in his ongoing overhaul of RuneScape’s monetization. Jagex has hiked subscriptions repeatedly even while putting the screws to players over monetization and floating the idea of $33 subs in one poorly thought-out PR mess after another, but since taking over, Bellamy has been running monetization tests all summer to study how to extract money from RuneScape players without all the riots that have plagued the game in recent years. Here’s a direct quote about integrity from the person who canceled his own developers’ new Pride content:

“For RuneScape, adding back some of the integrity that maybe we lost over the last decade or so is more than monetisation; it’s visual integrity, it’s gameplay integrity, too. These experiments really touch on the monetisation aspect, but there’s more than a year’s worth of work yet to be announced and yet to be done on strengthening integrity across visual gameplay and monetisation.”

Finally, there’s some interesting news in the interview about RuneScape Dragonwilds; even though its Steam numbers and player reviews are in yikes territory, the game apparently sold almost a million early access copies so far and prompted Jagex to double its investment plan in the game. In other words, though it’s in an extremely rough and unfinished state, expect development to continue, at least as long as it fits the RuneScape First vision.