When I used to be 12 or so, I bear in mind hanging out in a nook of browser-based digital pet game Neopets referred to as “Evil Things and Monster Sightings” or “EMS,” and pledging to some web strangers that I’d by no means, ever stop Neopets. We’d be pals eternally.
EMS was a messageboard ostensibly set up for customers of Neopets to report, I don’t know, sightings of monsters round the web site? The game’s story villains? The objective was at all times unclear, in contrast to different on-site messageboards that had precise utility. But as a consequence, awkward teenagers and pre-teens (fudging their birthdays to entry the board forward of turning 13) gathered on EMS to chat about, properly, every little thing. We made pals, talked about life and the silly crap our dad and mom have been saying. We roleplayed, a lot, about dragons and magic and wolves and no matter different goofy stuff we thought was cool. At the time, I assumed the pals I made there can be my pals eternally. They knew all my deepest emotions and secrets and techniques and had shared theirs with me – how might we be separated?
And then we have been. At some level that I can’t particularly bear in mind, I finished visiting Neopets. I had definitely stop by the time I used to be in high college, leaving my very cool deal with “goldensun4747” behind and my pets to starve. Nothing specifically prompted my departure – I simply grew up and discovered different issues to do. And so did thousands and thousands of others like me. Over the final 25 years, Neopets gamers arrived, made pals, invested a good chunk of our childhood, and then light away as both we, or Neopets itself, modified with time.
Current Neopets CEO Dominic Law is one of these people for whom Neopets was a haven at a vital time in his life. He grew up with Neopets, entering into it as a child whereas residing in Canada and persevering with to play when his household moved to Hong Kong. Neopets was more than a game – it helped him keep in contact along with his pals back home. And like many others, with time, Law drifted away.
But in contrast to me, Law got here back – as a result of Neopets, regardless of the regular exodus of energetic customers, by no means actually died. It was owned by Viacom from 2005 to 2014, and then acquired by JumpStart Games in 2014 which was itself acquired by NetDragon in 2017. Throughout that period, Neopets suffered. Bugs and lag plagued the website; moderation instruments failed. The website hemorrhaged customers. Though it noticed a brief resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this didn’t final. In 2020, Adobe concluded its help for Flash, rendering most of Neopets’ beloved minigames unplayable. During this time, NetDragon employed Law – who had been working in personal equity – as its director of new markets, later selling him to chief metaverse officer of Neopets. And in that position, as Neopets floundered, Law led a push to implement Web3 into that backfired spectacularly.
With Neopets on its final legs and person sentiment and trust in the toilet, Law made a daring transfer. He purchased Neopets from NetDragon, making himself the new CEO, and kicked off what he promised can be a “new era” for the game. Neopets, he claimed, had been mismanaged for years, however Law had $4 million in investment money to revamp it. He would repair its damaged video games and bugs, improve its moderation instruments, and restore Neopets to “the glory days” he and thousands and thousands of others remembered from adolescence. And this time, he promised, no blockchain.
Ambassadors to Neopia
It’s been virtually a 12 months since Law unveiled his grand strategy, and to listen to him inform it at the Game Developers Conference final month, issues are going fairly properly. Sure, it’s a far cry from its glory days nonetheless. Neopets has 150 million registered customers from the totality of its 25-year historical past, however presently solely has about a million annual energetic customers. Still, Law says these energetic customers are actually energetic. Many have been taking part in for over 10 and even 15 years and caught round by way of the worst days of the firm. They’re few, however mighty.
That’s why Law is set to interact them and use that group energy to make Neopets higher. In his GDC discuss, “Working with the Community to Revive a Nostalgic IP: 'Neopets',” Law explains how he carried out a group ambassador program to help the firm higher join with the a million energetic customers it serves. First, Neopets ran an software and choice course of to establish ten group ambassadors (out of round 1000 functions) who knew the game inside and out, and have been already deeply engaged with the people taking part in it. Some of the chosen ten run massive Neopets fan websites, handle social media teams, or usually write guides to sure Neopets options that the group depends upon.
Then, with the ten chosen, it was time to get to work.
“The key roles and responsibilities of our community ambassadors are actually quite demanding, to be honest,” Law says. “First of all, it's community management and interaction. These community ambassadors actually help us gather community sentiments, insights, and even collect issues. As we provide updates to the game and introduce new features, these community ambassadors actually help us. They provide us actionable feedback on what we should develop. And whenever we have in-game events or even in real life events, they actually help us to do event coordination. They advocate and they promote the events for us.”
Law goes on to clarify that group ambassadors meet month-to-month with Neopets employees, each to supply insights from the communities themselves and obtain, from Neopets, updates on new options or fixes coming soon and roadmaps for long-term adjustments. Neopets additionally engaged them in group moderation, with Law telling me that the firm depends on ambassadors to report and speed up critical points that in any other case would get misplaced in the ticket system. It feels like a lot of work! In a Q&A following Law’s discuss, an viewers member probed this follow, asking how their time was revered and if there have been pathways to compensation in the future. I requested Law a related query later, in a one-on-one interview.
In each circumstances, Law identified that it was truly the group ambassadors who wish to do more work. “We definitely want to make sure that we don't abuse the relationship,” he says. “A lot of these community ambassadors, before joining, we made sure they understand what they're getting into. And a lot of them actually spend a lot of time at Neopets on their own, even before joining the program. And then they're actually seeing that this is a much more efficient way for them to express their love and passion in a way that's more organized. They actually, originally, the ambassadors suggested bi-weekly updates, and then we actually pushed back and said, ‘No, that's too frequent. We don't want to have so much work. We don't want to overburden our ambassadors.’”
Law doesn’t reply to the query about paths to future compensation, and notes they’re trying to broaden the program and convey on more ambassadors in the future. He tells me the present group of ambassadors are dedicated for a 12 months, and will take part in one-on-one suggestions periods at the finish to find out what labored properly, and what didn’t. He describes this as “kind of like your 360 review within the company.”
“We actually treat our committee ambassadors as a part of the team,” he says. Neopets has between 50-60 precise staff, a quantity that features outsourcing, freelancers, and staff engaged on tasks different than the web site.
Growth Without Growth
Alongside its group ambassador program, Neopets can be working to rebuild trust by way of different avenues. Law says the group holds month-to-month Q&A periods with the group, fixes bugs, conducts surveys to study what options need prioritizing, and is working to combine community-run tasks (comparable to dress-up software Dress to Impress) into the Neopets web site correct. There’s additionally a need to improve Neopets’ moderation instruments. Right now, it runs on a pretty strict textual content filter, however Law says the group is trying into AI tech or updating the total system to maintain the worst of the web at bay long-term.
But Law acknowledges that every one that is actually simply to maintain the present a million energetic customers blissful. It’s not about growth. Current customers wish to see Neopets’ damaged components get fixed. Lapsed customers wish to see updates consistent with the present construction of the website. But no one, in keeping with Law, is de facto clamoring for a full web site revamp. And that’s okay.
“I think the majority of the 140 million lapsed users, they kind of like the IP,” he says. “They have the emotional attachment, they have the childhood memory. They might come back for nostalgia, but they probably don't care as much if the classic game is revived. Would they play? They might come back for it to relive their childhood experience for a day or two, but they probably won't be long-time users.”
He’s proper, at the very least anecdotally. Shortly earlier than the panel at GDC, I made a new account on Neopets and poked my head in. Everything was simply as I remembered it. The Giant Omelet was nonetheless glistening in the Tyrannian solar. Shoyrus have been nonetheless everybody’s favourite. Paintbrushes and Neggs have been nonetheless the final hotness. All the aesthetics I remembered have been nonetheless in place. But after I visited the messageboards, there have been no acquainted names. Why would there be? It’s been 20 years. I logged out after about half-hour, and didn’t come back.
That’s okay, says Law. I’m not the goal demographic right here. People like me “probably graduated from Neopets for all the right reasons.”
“To be honest, we're not getting that many new users,” Law continues. “We don't really have the budget to do a lot of marketing to attract new users. And even if new users come play, it's probably too vast of an environment, they'll get lost. So we're targeting to attract lapsed users coming back to the game, and most specifically the recent lapsed users that they're still playing Neopets probably within the past three to five years. So they left Neopets [because of] the lack of updates, they got upset, they feel neglected.”
But that doesn’t imply Law is ignoring the energy of new or long-lapsed customers. He simply doesn’t suppose the web site is the method to hook them in. For these teams, Law is trying to different types of media. For occasion, later this 12 months, Neopets is launching a new TCG by way of Upper Deck. It’s received a Monopoly game coming, new plushes, and collectibles. And most significantly, Neopets is engaged on new video games. Two cell titles are already in the works, and Law says he desires to do a console game ultimately too – maybe a reimagining of The Darkest Faerie.
Which brings Law back round to the web site. Even if customers don’t stick round, it’s important to have the retro Neopets expertise nonetheless useful online someplace. If somebody like me comes back, seems round for half-hour, and leaves, that’s superb. But by the finish of that, I ought to know there are different Neopets experiences out in the world and wish to have interaction with them. It’s all fueled by nostalgia.
Elsewhere in our dialog, Law expresses disdain for the microtransaction-heavy, “gambling-driven” economies he sees in the gaming industry, particularly in the cell phase. When he mentions this, I ask him about his ventures into Web3. Is that half of it? Would he ever attempt to reintroduce blockchain or NFTs to Neopets after the group backlash? Law says no. He’s realized from his errors, and Web3 is essentially at odds with the customers Neopets must survive – whose love for the game may be very a lot tied to Web2.0 wistfulness.
“Web2 gamers in general, not just Neopets players, actually don't really care about Web3 gaming. At the end of the day, it is too much of just gambling and it's not really about the fun of the game. I think that really kills the entertainment of playing a game, in essence, and I think that's the major clash.”
I level out that he’s actively fundraising. What occurs when buyers begin asking him to put the monetization on thicker? Law believes he can maintain his ground, due to the instance set by the group the first time he tried Web3.
“Our investors who previously believed in the Web3 story, they actually believe in the much broader revival of the Neopets IP,” he says. “And they see that what we're doing is definitely on the right track. It’s much more important for us to revive the IP than try to build a game that no one will play.”
Somehow, for 25 years, Neopets has clung to life regardless of bugs, a number of acquisitions, technological failures, and the loss of most of its customers. Law’s imaginative and prescient for Neopets, then, is neither to remodel the web site into some kind of fantastical “Neopets 2.0,” neither is it to discard the historical browser game altogether. It’s all about IP, and placing Neopets in entrance of as many people as potential, in as many various types as he can.
Will a number of cell video games, a TCG, plushes, a Monopoly game, and no matter else the firm is cooking up be enough to make Neopets the “number-one virtual pet companionship IP,” as Law hopes? Maybe. I’ll set a reminder on my calendar for 25 years from now: “Check in on EMS and see how things are going.” If Law and Neopets obtain their targets, I’ll nonetheless be capable to just do that.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].