Remember NeoPets, the online game from the early 2000s about raising pets? Why is it around, especially after all of its contemporaries have fallen?
To understand its continued success, one must first understand how Neopets came to be. The website was started in November 1999, by founders Adam Powell and Donna Williams, and was initially intended to be a social hub for university students that made money through the sale of banner ads. As the early 2000s rolled around, however, Powell had another idea: pivoting the site towards a younger audience.
Inspired from the ideas of franchises like Pokémon, Powell created customizable creatures that would act as avatars: the modern NeoPet. To keep users coming back, activities and games were coded in using Adobe Flash. These could be used to earn points that could be spent on cosmetics for their NeoPets.
However, players would have to pay with in-game currency to access the games in the first place, adding a risk for those partaking in them, as a person might not be able to make back their initial investment. This aspect caused a player-run economy to spring up, with users trading and selling items to keep their profits up. The website became a trading floor for these miniature magnates, haggling and initiating deals for the best financial angle possible. The site’s complexity caused it to explode in popularity, and by 2005, it had reached 35 million concurrently active players.
So, with all of the hubbub, why is it that the game is not talked about today? Well, that problem mainly pertains to the fact that the engine the site was running on, Adobe Flash, was a piece of software that was already aging at the time of the site’s release. Adobe Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2020. By that point, the site was in complete disarray, the entirety of it hinged on Flash’s existence, so its absence in browsers killed it. Throughout its life, NeoPets was acquired, bought, and sold by various different companies, causing leadership to constantly change. This lack of one vision for the site caused the brand to feel directionless, with it entering projects ranging from NFTs to mobile game adaptations of the site.
All this being said, how is NeoPets still up? While there is little information regarding the site’s resurgence, most attribute it to the acts done by the game’s community; particularly when a group of users acquired the site from its previous owners, effectively breaking the previous cycle of ownership. Under these new owners, the platform has already received much-needed maintenance, including a plan to migrate it from Flash. They have also consolidated the company’s operations, canceling its plans to enter the Metaverse as well as to create a mobile app. Hopefully, this means that the site will enter a new era, one that has a defined sense of direction.
