Neopets, the virtual pet website launched in 1999, is promising a “new era” with an improved website and fixed Flash games. They will launch a new unified website on July 20th to fix issues and bring back over 50 Flash games using the Ruffle emulator starting July 25th. A new Neopets mobile game called World of Neopets is planned for next year. The team is moving away from crypto and NFTs to focus on core gaming. After being acquired by a management buyout, the independent Neopets team now has the resources to make meaningful changes and pursue a “Neopian renaissance.” They plan regular updates, AMAs and an ambassador program in the coming months.
Is there a word for the opposite of enshitification?
Maybe… maybe this is the next stage of enshittification? When enshittification has so utterly destroyed a company that it’s essentially worth nothing, there’s only two options: it dies, or the remaining employees who actually care about it buy it in an attempt to save it.
“oh shit we drove away our core user base by making our site actively hostile and it turns out the end result of that is no money”
It’s interesting that they plan to just milk remaining nostalgia rather than move forward by converting games to HTML5, etc., as that indicates no new games. Or, being more optimistic, maybe the plan IS conversion and new games but this is a stop-gap?
Neopets has changed hands so many times. I was there from the beginning, when it was more of a weirdly British satire site (the original Bruce was not a penguin FYI), and watching everything unfold has been so weird.
