Neopets

Keira Madsen

Apr 11, 2023

Participatory Culture in Web 1.0, 2.0, & 3.0

THE STORY

When Neopets was launched in 1999, it was an instant success with children browsing the internet for the first time. The premise of the game is that you own a virtual pet who lives in a world called Neopia. You have to look after your neopet and provide it with things like clothing, food, toys, medicine, and more. There are also hundreds of free-to-play mini games. Users can buy virtual items using one of two virtual currencies – either neopoints, which can be earned within the site by playing the mini games, or neocash, which can be either purchased with real-world money or won by chance in game. It’s even possible to buy and sell stocks on the neopian stock market.

At its peak in the mid-2000s, there were 25 million worldwide users. Members of this bustling community could participate in various activities: neopia’s active economy, forums, guilds, holiday festivals, and contests (like user-created art). Neopets also introduced many kids to coding and graphic design, by offering a page for all players that could be customized. There was also a huge array of fansites, including “The Daily Neopets”, which was a newspaper about the goings-on in Neopia.

Today & beyond

Over the years, Neopets struggled to adapt to new technologies and to attract younger generations, and the website slowly stagnated. In 2017, when flash was discontinued, it hit the website hard because that software was critical for the interactivity of the site (especially the mini games and pet design). The developers started creating a mobile-friendly version of Neopets that ran on HTML5, but there’s still a huge backlog of features and games that haven’t been converted and probably never will. In the months following March 2020, there was a 30-40% spike in usership, leading to an estimated 100,000 daily active users and 1.5 million monthly active players. Today, its current user base is mostly 20-40 year olds; as one current user put it, “recently, the site feels like the one place on the internet that can be an escape”. Certain topics are banned in its chat rooms, like politics and Covid-19. Currently, most of the users are people who identify as female, which is higher than in other MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games), but equivalent to social-networking driven communities. Outside of the Neopets site itself there are active YouTube channels, podcasts, subreddits, etc.

In 2021, Neopet NFTs were created – the Neopets Metaverse Collection minted 4225 pieces for the genesis collection. The Neopets Metaverse project received a significant amount of criticism from within the Neopets community, citing general concerns about NFTs, as well as details specific to the Neopets Metaverse. As of January 19th, 2023, the company got $4 million in funding from “Web3 Leaders” to start Neopets Metaverse, with the intention to “bring the 90s classic to the metaverse for over 150 million fans worldwide”. Not only do the Neopets get a revamped look and the world goes from 2D to 3D, there is also more of a focus on making real-world money through the game. The website for the Neopets Metaverse describes it as “a decentralized, blockchain-based virtual world in which users can interact in a persistent 3D environment”.