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Old School RuneScape developer Jagex was forced to make a hardline stance against cryptocurrency-driven market manipulation after the MMO's economy faced peculiar investments and scarcities driven by, of all things, a meme coin gauged against RuneScape items.

In a blog post, Jagex observes, "Recently, we've seen cryptocurrencies and meme coins appear that track, trade against, or otherwise attempt to tie themselves to the price or volume of items in our games. We want to be clear about where we stand."

Jagex stands firmly on the grave of meme coins, laying out a "a zero-tolerance approach" to cryptocurrency and market manipulation.

Because this practice sees real money "influence our economies and people are incentivised to act with the intention of real financial gain," Jagex writes, it's classified as real-world trading, which is banned in RuneScape and has seen increasing crackdown after OSRS tech and rule changes.

"Whether a given activity constitutes malicious market manipulation is at Jagex's sole discretion," the post adds. "Actions that have unintended consequences for the economy may also result in action against your account, the severity of which will be proportionate to the suspected intent of the user(s)."

This mess kicked up a few days ago after some crypto traders hatched the idea of hoarding OSRS' Robin Hood Hats, a fairly rare piece of headwear only obtainable from scavenger hunt-like clue scrolls.

The idea, it seems, was to stoke publicity and a market narrative, or at least a shell convincing enough to attract buyers to the coin and accrue trading fees. It's not far removed from common prediction market grifts. OSRS, which looks to be at its peak and has drawn quite some attention in the MMO space, simply provided a visible, searchable theater for the performance, and a fairly malleable open market.

As a post from Robinhood Alpha, shilling the now-radioactive coin, puts it: "The strategy uses its treasury to accumulate hats, reduce the available floating supply and build an onchain narrative around a real in-game economy."

In the past nine days, the in-game price of Robin Hood Hats has surged from 730,000 to about 1.1 million gold pieces (GP) in OSRS – not an all-time high, but a huge spike to the highest price seen in at least six months. However, the volume of hats traded went to the moon after this scheme broke: from an August peak of 1,158 in a day to a monstrous 5,744 in September, with multiple recent days tripling previous volumes.

A "Robin Hood Hat Strategy" account that was seemingly in on the coin boasts of collecting over 9,000 hats all for themselves, and now laments having nothing to do with the hats. "Not the easiest decision, but in line with recent events, it is now virtually impossible to truly collect hats, which was ultimately the goal from the start," says the apparent trader.

Normal OSRS players flagged this crypto manipulation from the get-go, and are unsurprisingly celebrating the death of the meme coin. "Jagex just owned the crypto bros and I’m here for it," says one user on a hot Reddit post.

ChatGPT employee makes a "RuneScape clone," immediately gets slapped by Jagex lawyers, then acts like he's leaving some great legacy behind in a goodbye post surely written by AI.

Nintendo games are arguably the reason to own a Nintendo console, even today. But with developers keen to get their games in front of as many players as possible, you can find plenty of third-party titles among the best Switch 2 games out there. Back in the GameCube era, though, Nintendo's lack of third-party support was downright infamous, and a newly released chart of the platform's best-selling games suggests there's a reason most publishers steered clear of the 'cube.

The 20 best-selling US GameCube games of all time were shared today by Mat Piscatella of industry analysis group Circana. The top spots on the list are dominated by some of the straight-up best GameCube games ever, including titles like Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

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Nintendo games absolutely dominate the top 10, with just two third-party entries squeezing in: Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Mega Collection. I was just old enough to recognize how weird it was to be getting Sega games on a Nintendo platform, and I guess that novelty helped propel these Sonic games near the top of the charts.

Happy 25th to the Nintendo GameCube!Here are top 20 best-selling GameCube games in the US, ranked by unit sales.Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart: Double Dash!! lead the list.Source: Circana Retail Tracking Service

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T20:11:21.927Z

Things even out in the rest of the top 20, where five of the remaining ten come from third parties, with Lego Star Wars, Sonic Heroes, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, Super Monkey Ball 2, and SoulCalibur 2. Namco's fighting game might have had a slight advantage with Nintendo fans, though, since they put Link in it.

Perhaps the most notable absence from the list is Resident Evil 4, which launched as a GameCube exclusive and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all time. Apparently it landed just outside the top 20 at number 21, having sold 7,899 fewer units than Kirby Air Ride. No wonder the Capcom Five eventually went multi-platform.

Unfortunately, we don't have similar stats for the modern Switch era. Wikipedia's list of best-selling Switch games is also top-heavy with Nintendo titles, but that's certainly at least partly due to the fact that third-parties tend not to publicly report sales data per platform. Meanwhile, Nintendo is happy to report every new million that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold.

Given the fact that third-party developers were very willing to put in the work to downgrade their PS4 and Xbox One games to get them running on Switch, it seems all but certain that there was an appetite for third-party games on the platform, and that trend seems to be continuing on Switch 2. But for now, that's just guesswork – maybe we'll actually get stats on how it all breaks down when Switch celebrates its own 25th anniversary in 2042. I wonder if The Elder Scrolls 6 will be out by then…

Donkey Kong 64 beat Pokemon mania to become the best-selling game of 1999 in the US.