A New Era For Neopets
Greetings, Neopians!
The Neopets Team (TNT) has ground-breaking news to share that’s even more exciting than a Hidden Tower clearance sale! We are delighted to announce a phenomenal change that we are confident will usher in an incredible new era to Neopets. Drum roll please…
TNT is thrilled to be operating under the guidance of a brand new leadership team! With the support of this new leadership, TNT now has access to assets that will empower us to breathe fresh life into Neopia.
For most of the last decade, the The Neopets Team has been under the management of JumpStart Games, which, over time, has struggled to find success for Neopets. Beset by ageing site features, a waning user base, and a lack of resources, TNT had to work tirelessly just to barely keep the site afloat. The resources available to us simply weren’t substantial enough to sustain the level of growth and development that the site needed to keep up with the times, resulting in bugs, unconverted pages, broken games, and a lack of new content. Despite these challenges, TNT pushed onward, guided by an unwavering belief that this iconic brand that has meant so much to so many truly deserved better.
Enter the new leadership team, headed by Dominic Law. A fan himself, Dom spent hours on Neopets.com in the early 2000s earning Neopoints to care for his beloved Shoyru. He became reacquainted with the brand in 2020 after joining Jumpstart’s parent company, Netdragon. Eager to revisit his old digital stomping grounds, Dom put together a team of passionate and like-minded individuals to help NetDragon strategize on the best way forward to revitalise the Neopets brand.
As many of you may have seen, Jumpstart was shut down on June 30th, 2023. Prior to this shutdown, Dom pushed NetDragon to save Neopets. A management buyout deal was struck, allowing the two Neopets teams to combine forces and become an independent company. Free from the corporate baggage that existed in the past, the newly united TNT has now been entrusted with the decision-making and overall brand strategy of Neopets, enabling them to work solely on the betterment of the entire Neopets game and community.
Until this point, Neopets has been running at a loss for over a decade, making it hard to enact any major overhaul; however, in early 2023 Neopets raised $4M in funding from various investors with plans to nurture a shared dream of an immersive, community-driven gaming experience. In tandem with additional funding from the management buyout, TNT has been primed to enact real, actionable change for Neopets. We truly want more for Neopians! This magical community deserves to thrive, not just survive. Thanks to our new leadership direction and the fresh source of funding, it finally can. The Neopets Team is, for the first time in over a decade, equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance.
The funding raised from our management team and external investors will allow us to revive the brand as a whole. We’ve already hired a handful of new developers and artists. From fixing the many issues on the classic site to reevaluating the direction of mobile games like Island Builders, these skilled new additions to TNT are already working hard to show Neopia the same devoted care our players have shown to their beloved Neopets over the years.
So, what’s next for Neopets?
The first thing we did was review the most pressing community requests. We have begun exploring the use of Ruffle to resolve the issues caused by the end of Flash in hopes of speeding up the process of bringing functionality back to our beloved games. We’re also working our way through numerous page conversions and bug fixes, tackling the mobile browser compatibility issues, and making improvements to our customer support protocol.
We also took a long, hard look at community feedback on Neopets Metaverse, and it quickly became clear that the game just didn’t line up with everything that made Neopets… well… Neopets! We constantly see references to KeyQuest, NeoQuest, and Habitarium (see, we do read your comments!) and we want to design a game that’s more in line with what the community has been asking for. Taking all of this into account, our new leadership made it their priority to listen to TNT on how to move forward into the future with Neopians in mind, so together we went back to the drawing board.
The Neopets Team rolled up their sleeves and set out to foundationally transform the project into something entirely different by bringing on additional designers, developers, and writers to help craft a game that the Neopian community would embrace. Most recently, the decision was made to transition to a mobile app and rebuild from the ground up as World of Neopets, a social life-simulation game in which you live your ideal Neopian life from the perspective of a Neopet! Decorate your Neohome, explore iconic Neopian lands in 3D, discover secret treasures and knowledge, or play mini-games while you party with your Neofriends—all while you interact and quest with a collection of your favourite Neopian characters!
But these aren’t the only changes we have in store!
Going forward, Neopets will be under the control of a new, unified entity: World of Neopia, Inc. Don’t worry, the Neopets.com that you know and love isn’t going anywhere; in fact, there are great things on the horizon for the classic virtual pet site that started it all. Bringing all of the Neopets products under the direction of one company will allow the different departments of The Neopets Team to communicate more effectively about how to best serve users and realign Neopets with the core values of the Neopets community.
We are thrilled to be working together as one unified team guided by principles of transparent communication and community-centric product development. We want to create games that the Neopets community will love, and that means listening closely to what users have to say. In fact, we already are—we want to bring Neopets back to its glory days as much as all of you, and we’re committed to making it happen.
We have already seen early successes: our customer support ticket backlog has decreased by more than 80% and our work on the roadmap put forward at the end of last year has begun to accelerate. From cleaning up the Neoboards to lowering the Altador Cup threshold by 25%, TNT is committed to continuing a two-sided conversation with the community that addresses user concerns head-on. Moving forward, TNT will begin releasing monthly updates, hosting regularly scheduled AMAs, and launch an exciting new brand ambassador program. This brand ambassador program in particular will help to bridge the gap by enabling key members of the Neopets community to serve as liaisons to TNT, helping make Neopets better for everyone by advocating for the wants and needs of players. To learn more about all of our plans, check out our newly updated roadmap.
Where can you see this roadmap? We are thrilled to announce that, on July 20th, 2023, we are launching our unified Neopets homepage! This central hub for Neopets will serve as a one stop shop for all brand announcements, links to our different games and products, a repository of Neopets articles and related links, and anything else Neopian you can think of!
Fellow Neopians, we are on the precipice of a new era. With the 25th anniversary of Neopets approaching next year, we have snowager-sized plans up our sleeves to celebrate. A relaunch of Island Builders, an exclusive virtual concert, and a brand new plot (yes, you read that correctly) are just a few of the exciting plans we have for the near future! However, we aren’t out of the (haunted) woods just yet. To make all this happen, we need your support—log into the site and play, follow us on socials, download one of our mobile games, and tell your friends to join. Please! We want to bring as much awareness to these fabulous new changes coming to Neopets as possible, so we’re launching a contest to encourage user engagement.
Starting today, new and existing Neopets players can enter our 2,000,000 Neocash giveaway contest. To participate, users can complete tasks like logging into the site, following our socials, and referring friends to Neopets. The more tasks you complete, the more NC you might win! This is one contest you won’t want to miss, and it’s what we hope is just the tip of the iceberg for the many ways we plan to give back to the loyal players who have stuck by Neopets for so long. The contest ends on August 6th, 2023, so act fast!
Well, Neopians, thanks for listening to our (slightly lengthy) tale. We hope that you feel as optimistic as we do, and, as always, we hope to see you in Neopia.
Signed,
The Neopets Team
