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?
Flash games will work again? Moving away from NFTs? Well dang, I might just make a new neopets account! Lots of nostalgia there, it’d be cool to mess around with again after all these years.
Ugh, about time they stopped shilling the NFT shit.
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.
I don’t use neopets anymore but I have been following the neopets saga. I will believe it when I see it, they promised this with the site redesign back when flash died, and most of the original games are still not playable years later.
Too many overdue promises. I say this as a long time neopian. Every couple years would play for a few weeks of nostalgia. They’ve promised a lot over the years and I was willing to keep waiting, but the nft drama and disrespect it conveyed to the community really disillusioned me. Haven’t logged on since. Would love to be proven wrong.
The guy that bought it is the one who ran the neopets metaverse thing. So it sounds a little dubious.
Deshittification?
Also, holy cow that still exists?
Also also, I wonder if I’ll be able to play Super Mario Bros Crossover again some day.
