RuneScape CEO Drops Bombshell: A Tenth Of A $400 Million Budget Can Rival AAA—Just Look At Clair Obscur

Here is a sentence you don’t hear often from a big-studio boss: you don’t need a mountain of cash to make a hit. Jagex’s new CEO Jon Bellamy is saying exactly that, and he brought receipts.

Big budgets are rare, and not the only way to win

In a recent chat with The Game Business, Bellamy pointed to the kind of breakout titles that weren’t built on AAA money or headcount, calling out Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a prime example. His take: massive spend is not the magic ingredient.

"You can take a $400 million budget — and there’s not many of them left — but you can also take a swing with a tenth of that and deliver not so different results if you get it right."

That’s the part a lot of folks on the outside don’t see: the $400 million productions are the exception now, not the rule, and they still miss. Meanwhile, smaller, focused teams keep popping up with games that punch way above their financial weight.

Clair Obscur as the poster child (and why people keep bringing it up)

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 didn’t roll in with a Godzilla-sized budget, yet it’s become the go-to example of how sharp design and clear vision can cut through the noise. Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida even praised it earlier this year for threading the needle: AAA ambition, a tighter AA budget, and a very distinct indie sensibility. That’s basically the goldilocks zone everyone claims they’re aiming for.

Inside baseball note: the comparison that inevitably gets tossed around here is the Hollow Knight corner of the world — and, yes, people love to point to projects like Silksong as the kind of non-AAA scale that can still shake the room. The point isn’t the label; it’s that you don’t need a blank check to make something that sticks.

The hidden cost of going huge

Sandfall’s own COO and producer, Francois Meurisse, has been candid about the flipside of mega-spend. His argument, paraphrased: there are plenty of enormous, expensive productions that simply don’t land, and building at that scale isn’t just risky financially — it burns people out. It’s not exactly a secret inside the industry, but it’s rare to hear someone say it that plainly.

Why Bellamy is saying this now

Bellamy is not just commenting on trends from the sidelines; he’s setting the tone for Jagex, the studio behind RuneScape. He says seeing games like Clair Obscur spark this much excitement is a morale boost for developers who left giant studios feeling drained. If smaller, smarter swings can hang with the big-budget releases, that broadens what a studio can attempt — and how sustainable the attempt can be.

Jagex’s target: second place in the West

He also has a pretty blunt view of the company’s identity: "The French make wine and the Germans make cars and Jagex makes RuneScape." Translation: they know what they’re good at, and they’re doubling down on it. Over the next five years, Bellamy wants RuneScape to be at least "the second biggest MMO" in the West, right behind World of Warcraft — and he says "we’re already very close to that."

Ambitious? Definitely. But stacked next to his budget take, the strategy tracks: less about ballooning spend for the sake of optics, more about targeted, player-first improvements that move the needle. If the recent wave of AA and indie-scale hits proves anything, it’s that momentum isn’t reserved for the folks lighting money on fire.