Neopets was one of the hottest destinations on the World Wide Web in the early 2000s, but the audience for its virtual pets has been in decline for years now. Neopets itself has also declined, admit its developers, who say they had to “work tirelessly to barely keep the site afloat” while operating at a loss for 10 years. Things will soon change, the developers say, because for the first time since 2005, Neopets is once again an independent company.
Viacom bought Neopets for $160 million near its peak in 2005 and sold it in 2014 to US edutainment entertainment company JumpStart, which was later acquired by Chinese game developer NetDragon. For undisclosed reasons, NetDragon shut down JumpStart last month, and Neopets might have gone along with it had it not been rescued by a “management buyout deal,” according to a team blog post. newly revamped Neopets development facility.
This team, made up of Neopets developers who previously worked for JumpStart and NetDragon, is now part of a new company called World of Neopia. The new studio is led by Dominic Law, who was previously in charge of NetDragon’s Neopets Metaverse NFT project: a Neopets NFT collection and blockchain game in development. According to the blog post, Law led the effort to save Neopets from JumpStart’s shutdown, which culminated in the buyout that allowed JumpStart’s former Neopets team and NetDragon’s Neopets Metaverse team “to join forces and become an independent company” with Law as its CEO.
“Freed from the corporate baggage that existed in the past, the new united [Neopets team] has now been entrusted with the decision-making and overall strategy of the Neopets brand, allowing them to work solely for the betterment of the entire game and the Neopets community,” the announcement reads.
Despite Law’s previous role as head of Neopets NFT gaming – just a few months ago he said Neopets had “all the right ingredients for Web3 games” – and $4 million in funding that Neopets has received from crypto companies earlier this year, the now-indie studio says it’s immediately “stepping away” from the Neopets Metaverse NFT game. Instead, it will reuse some of that game’s strengths in a new mobile game called World of Neopets, “a social life simulation game where you live your ideal Neopian life from a Neopet’s perspective.” For now at least, World of Neopets will not include NFTs or cryptocurrency.
“The Neopets team looked closely at every nook and cranny of Neopets, and after that the decision was made to move away from the Neopets Metaverse game and redistribute those resources to developing a game that we believe will can best reflect our values and vision,” reads a notice on the Neopets Metaverse website.
The company adds that existing Neopets Metaverse NFTs “are all still available in the open market” and that it “will continue to support the Web3 community that has embraced ownership of these collections,” but does not say what that support will be. in addition to keeping a Discord server open. He did not, for example, tell NFT owners that he would give them any kind of consolation bonus in the upcoming World of Neopets game, which he says “is NOT built on a crypto model.”
One thing World of Neopia says it will do is work on the original Neopets website, where it says it’s already fixing bugs and re-launching games that were discontinued at the end of Adobe Flash support. “Don’t worry, the Neopets.com you know and love isn’t going anywhere; in fact, there are big things on the horizon for the classic virtual pet site that started it all,” the announcement read.
On July 20, a new Neopets homepage will launch, and the developers say it will include a roadmap with more details on the future of the nearly 25-year-old virtual pet game. There’s also a little more about the future of Neopets in today’s big blog post, including news of an “exclusive virtual concert”, “a brand new storyline” and a giveaway to celebrate this. “new era” of Neopets.