After three years of software issues, Glendale-based World of Neopia Inc. is revitalizing and renewing its popular virtual pet and gaming platform.
World of Neopia announced that its game, called Neopets, hit a five-year site traffic high over the summer following several large changes this year, including a switch to independent ownership, a $4 million funding round and a change in executive leadership.
The whimsically animated gaming platform began to face significant technical and structural issues in 2020 after the software it was built on, Adobe Flash, was discontinued. The spark of the company’s resurgence can be largely attributed to a new partnership with a Flash emulator called Ruffle.
According to World of Neopia Chief Executive Dominic Law, Neopets had about 6.4 million site visits in August, up 40% from 4.7 million in June, prior to the Ruffle announcement. The game was launched in 1999 by two independent designers and was a childhood staple for many of that generation. Set on a virtual planet called Neopia, which has its own calendar and stock market, players are encouraged to adopt virtual pets, interact with the in-game world, buy items for their pets with virtual currency and play a large selection of minigames. There were once more than 100 minigames available, including puzzles and multiplayer action games, that let players earn points to spend on their virtual pets. However, the minigames, along with most of the Neopets platform, ran on Adobe Flash and became nonfunctional when Flash met its demise in 2020. The Neopets game never went down, but its functionality is another matter.
“Back when Flash was dominating the internet, there weren’t really any other programs that did the same thing, so it was very unique,” Ruffle spokesperson Sammie McPhail said. “Rather than being its own system or program, it was made to be integrated within a website, so it could attract a larger user base … most websites invested in Flash, so when Flash went down, a lot of websites and content went down with it.”
Adobe Flash was a multimedia software tool that could be used for animation, graphic design, application production and interactive web elements. Users of online community boards devoted to Neopets frequently speak about technical issues that have plagued the platform since Flash’s death. Content creator Li Speaks said it has been in a “half-converted zombie state” in a recent review of the game. With Ruffle, Law said that Neopets has brought back more than 90 minigames and has received positive feedback from the player community about the restoration of its “nostalgic” features.
“The Neopets team (had) tried to rebuild those Flash games in HTML5 after Adobe Flash, however it was not effective,” Law said. “We are continuing to work closely with the Ruffle team as we understand there’s still room for improvement. We are on it.”
Independent ownership
The company is making big changes. The Neopets platform is now independently owned for the first time in nearly two decades after being purchased under its original form, Neopets Inc., by Viacom Inc. in 2005 for $160 million. The company changed hands again in 2014, when it was acquired by JumpStart Games, a subsidiary of NetDragon Websoft, which shut down in June. It was during JumpStart’s ownership of Neopets that Adobe Flash was discontinued.
Neopets began a new NFT project in September of 2021 called Neopets Metaverse, which attracted $4 million in funding this January, including support from Polygon Ventures, NetDragon and the Blizzard Avalanche Ecosystem Fund. However, Neopets Metaverse was formally canceled in July. Law said that the resources would be redistributed to developing new features and improving the quality of the Neopets desktop platform as well as its mobile game.
Neopets was purchased from NetDragon through a management buyout deal in July, and the resulting company, World of Neopia, is now headed by Law and composed of employees from Neopets and Neopets Metaverse. Law previously served as the director of new markets at NetDragon and the chief executive of Neopets Metaverse. The company said it raised additional funding from investors during the management buyout and has a “healthy” runway, with income coming from a combination of premium subscription accounts, licensing and merchandise, advertising revenue and in-game purchases for playable items.
“As a longtime Neopets fan myself, I am thrilled to help Neopets realize its fullest potential by putting the focus back on building and growing,” Law. “With the help of our team here at Neopets, our investors and, most importantly, our loyal community of fans, we will work together to bring Neopets back to its glory days and beyond.”
One of the strongest points for Neopets’ business is its generational base of users who first logged on as children and have continued playing into adulthood. Law said the company has three main goals going forward: restoring the original Neopets desktop version, creating new features for the Neopets mobile game and building a stronger pipeline for its merchandise and licensing business. He said the biggest effort right now is working on the original Neopets.com site to attract returning users and create new plot developments and in-game events.
“(We want to) keep the nostalgic look and feel and improve the existing user experience,” Law said.
Flash fizzled
Other popular games that were built on Adobe Flash included “Farmville” and Disney-owned “Club Penguin.” Adobe announced in 2017 that, at the end of 2020, it would end all support, distribution and updates for the program, in part due to Apple Inc.’s refusal to support Flash on any of its iOS devices. Except for China, where Flash still runs, most browsers restricted Flash-supported content in 2020 in anticipation of the program’s death.
Ruffle is an open-sourced and community-run platform that was formally launched in 2021. While the gap left by Flash’s demise was detrimental for many developers and companies, Ruffle community manager Sonam Ford said that emulators are not as common as one might think.
“Ruffle’s work is very important for keeping Flash content alive – it’s surprising even to me how it has become almost ‘the only game in town’ in a sense,” Ford said. “Most Flash content really does ‘just work’ with just the simple addition of a script tag to the website (and) any old Flash site that you find still functioning on the web today is probably using Ruffle for at least some of its content.”
Michael Borys is a professor at the ArtCenter College of Design and the senior vice president of interaction and game design at Pasadena-based Animal Repair Shop LLC. He said that Flash’s strength was its ability to export very small, controlled file sizes. His own work relied heavily on Flash, and he said its death was “difficult,” though it taught many companies to never rely on a single technology for their business. However, after adapting to the software’s loss, Borys said that creative momentum increased across the industry.
“When it came to Flash being removed from us, yes, there was plenty of lamenting, but it just made us more creative with what we had,” Borys said. “I think a lot of times that brings out content that is far superior. When I look at the games that are out right now, there’s no way that we could have done them if we were limited to what was within Flash script.”
Some games couldn’t adapt to the loss of Flash and were discontinued, including “Farmville” and “Club Penguin.” Neopets never removed its platform, but it didn’t quite work, either. Under the partnership with Ruffle, new games have been added and many originals have been restored, though some are still not running correctly. Neopets is compensating Ruffle, which is powered by donations, with $500 per month for its support. According to Open Collective, the funding platform that Ruffle uses, the emulator has raised $114,594 to date.
“For a large portion of our community, minigames are a core component of what makes Neopets what it is,” Law said in a statement. “In our original list of our promises, we set out a goal to bring back 50 minigames. We have quickly been able to build on that number and continue to work on site fixes daily, which wouldn’t be possible without the support we’ve received from Ruffle.”
While the platform is beginning to right its ship, only time will tell if generational players will hang around. The game was once a cultural phenomenon, so popular that McDonald’s Inc. put Neopets characters in its Happy Meal offerings. Neopets is entering a new chapter, and it will be up to the company’s new ownership to balance whether it will focus more on attracting returning users or marketing itself to a new, younger audience.
“There clearly is a heavy Neopets community that has withstood the test of time, so they’re very loyal,” McPhail said. “It does seem like it’s really good timing for us to be involved. We seem to be helping them out at time when they’re having their own self revival, and it’s really nice to be a part of that.”