Neopets, the iconic virtual pet website that dominated a substantial number of mid-2000s childhoods, is staging yet another comeback - this time "free from corporate baggage."
Neopets launched way back in 1999, and has continued to live under a wide array of investors and corporate sponsors ever since. In 2014, JumpStart Games bought Neopets, and in 2017, a Chinese company called NetDragon bought JumpStart. On June 30, 2023, JumpStart shut down, but there's now been a deal to unify the Neopets leadership and development teams and spin off a separate company to oversee the game.
That new company is called World of Neopia, as the devs explain in a lengthy blog post. "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."
Neopets.com will become a "unified website" on July 20, offering a "landing page for everything Neopets related, including Neopets.com and information on our mobile apps, through one URL instead of several different ones." The devs plan to revive "more than 50 games" that were broken with the loss of Flash compatibility, and are currently building a 3D social life sim called World of Neopets for mobile.
With all this, the previously-announced Neopets Metaverse is shutting down, and while the NFTs sold as part of that project will continue to exist in the internet ether, the devs explicitly say there are no plans for NFTs or other crypto integration in World of Neopets. That's likely to serve as relief to many fans, especially since Dominc Law, the new CEO of World of Neopia, was previously Neopets' chief Metaverse officer.
