Neopets Is Actually Being Reborn
Neopets, a beloved virtual pet website that launched in 1999, has announced a new era for The Neopets Team (TNT), which will be operating under the guidance of a brand new leadership team of a newly formed independent company called World of Neopia, Inc. This grants the TNT access to assets and creative freedoms that will empower the team to breathe new life into virtual pets and the world of Neopia.
Neopets announced on Medium that it will launch a new unified website this week and fix some of its old Flash games shortly after—which is really a necessity, considering that Flash has been outdated, abandoned by nearly all developers, and has shifted into the domain of legacy tech.
But that isn’t everything, and things have changed since the glory days of Neopets, which is why the team has announced a brand-new mobile game titled World of Neopets, described by the team as a social life-simulation game.
Neopets, the virtual pet website popular in the early 2000s is being revitalized by a new team of developers.
As to why the Neopets game hasn’t graced any of our smartphone app stores, the answer is rather simple: virtual pets were popular in the very early 2000s, before the era of smartphones, which many consider to have begun with the release of the first iPhone in 2007.
By then, Neopets had waned in popularity, and TNT struggled to keep the website afloat due to aging site features and a lack of resources that would fuel sustainability and further growth, let alone develop a smartphone app.
As for the Neopets website, TNT is bringing back some of its games by integrating the Ruffle emulator for the now-defunct Adobe Flash, with plans to revive more than 50 games starting July 25. The team has also expressed hopes to convert many of their beloved games to HTML5 standard.
Neopian lands will now be explorable in 3D, with plenty of stuff for Neopian friends to do.
As for their Neopets Metaverse game, which was previously released as a web game, it doesn’t seem to function anymore, which is a good thing in itself, considering the fandom’s backlash due to TNTs foray into NTF-based games—hear that Square Enix?
It’s a good thing that The Neopets Team has gone back to the drawing board and is now looking to foundationally transform the universe they’ve created into a modern version of an early-2000s website.
This also means that the team brought on additional designers, developers, and writers that would help create a better playground for the Neopian community, including the aforementioned website and smartphone app. According to the post on The Medium, the Neopian lands will now be explorable in 3D, with plenty of stuff for Neopian friends to do.
As for the Neopets website, TNT is bringing back some of its games by integrating the Ruffle emulator for the now-defunct Adobe Flash, with plans to revive more than 50 games starting July 25
What’s most interesting about the whole deal is that the TNT has already seen early success, with the customer support ticket backlog being reduced by more than 80 percent, which is significant progress. Furthermore, the team is also dedicated to continuing a two-sided conversation with the community to further address user concerns head-on, releasing monthly updates, and hosting regularly scheduled AMAs.
They even plan an ambassador program, which will launch in the next couple of months. It’s most likely for Neopets to launch their full-service next year, on the 25th anniversary of Neopets.
