Neopets is moving into a ‘new era’ — and leaving NFTs and the metaverse behind
By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
It might be time to log into your Neopets account again.
Neopets, a virtual pet website that first launched in 1999, certainly isn’t the phenomenon that it was in the early days of the internet. I have fond memories of the site — as a kid, I remember spending hours taking care of my dog-like Lupe character — but I haven’t paid any serious attention to Neopets for two decades because a lot of the site felt stuck in the past. Much of Neopets’ design is straight 2005, a lot of the old games built on Adobe Flash don’t work anymore, and some of the more recent attempts to revive interest, including an NFT project, feel out of touch in their own ways.
The many dedicated fans who still visit the site got some promising news this week. The team behind Neopets has spun themselves out into an independent company, is promising a “new era” for the game, and plans to make some changes fast: a new homepage launched on Thursday, and many fixed-up games are set to arrive on July 25th. “We’re definitely ready to go full steam ahead, and hopefully, we can bring Neopets back to its glory days,” Dominic Law, CEO of the new World of Neopia, Inc., says in an interview with The Verge.
Despite Neopets being nearly 24 years old and long past its heyday, the site still sees a fair bit of traffic: Law tells me Neopets has “close to a million” monthly active users, and that number “has been really consistent” over the past few years. “Our community is so strong,” he says. Even though the site has languished, there’s “a really loyal fanbase that has been sticking around.”
With the new
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