The old-school social game Neopets has gone independent and will be getting a mobile release. The Neopets Teams, more colloquially known as TNT, has revealed on their Neopets blog that they will be focusing on the development of their upcoming title.
Previously, they were under the management of the NetDragon subsidiary, Jumpstart, for the past decade. Neopets received lot of activity when it first launched in December of 1999; the virtual pet website allowed players to own rainbow-colored digital animal companions and accompany them in minigames which kept the site running for a long time. However, traction has slowed down as the website began to fall into disuse from the lack of development behind the game. Especially with the Flash becoming defunct, a ton of Neopets content became unusable considering the website heavily relied on its resources. Despite this, under the new leadership of Dominic Law, The Neopets Team has raised four million dollars to be used in revitalizing Neopets to fit the more modernized lifestyle of other titles similar to it. Many iconic minigames will be transitioning over to HTML5 while the Neopets Team works on the development of the Neopets mobile game.
In 2017, Jumpstart was acquired by NetDragon with the intent of leveraging the company’s connection to DreamWorks in order to access their intellectual properties. With this deal, Neopets was brought into it with its current holding of one hundred thousand active users. Afterward, the game would see fluctuating spikes in interest over the years. Especially during the pandemic, Neopets saw thirty to forty percent increase in activity.
Neopets previously had plans to maintain some stability. The Neopets Team attempted to enter into the Metaverse which would incorporate non-fungible tokens into the game as well. However, this new direction in development did not resonate well with long-time fans and contributed to the further decline of activity onwards. As result, the Metaverse project was discontinued due to the mass amount of negative reception.
Jumpstart officially shut down in June 2023, making Neopets become its own independent company being the last operating property standing under them. As the company announced, “The Neopets Team is, for the first time in over a decade, equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance.” The Neopets Team confirmed their new mobile game World of Neopets which will function as a spin-off from the Neopets Metaverse. Rather than using Web3 and non-fungible tokens, this version of the game will be its own standalone title within the Neopets and will be a “return to form.”