Neopets is promising a 'new era' with an improved website and fixed Flash games - The Verge

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The new website launches this week.

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Image: Neopets

Neopets, the beloved virtual pet website that launched in 1999, announced a “new era” on Monday. The Neopets Team (TNT) said that it will be launching a new “unified website” this week and fixing some of the old Flash games shortly after, per an extensive blog post on Medium.

The new website, which will launch on July 20th, will “serve as a one stop shop for all brand announcements, links to our different games and products, a repository of Neopets articles and related links, and anything else Neopian you can think of!” TNT says in the post. Neopets.com “isn’t going anywhere,” TNT says, but the team will be giving the site some “extra care” to fix up some issues with the site, “including the Flash games.”

The team is bringing back some of the games by integrating the Ruffle emulator for the now-defunct Adobe Flash, and more than 50 games will be brought back starting on July 25th. Over the long term, “we hope to convert many of the most beloved games to HTML5,” TNT says.

But you won’t just have the old Neopets games to look forward to; TNT is also announcing a brand new Neopets mobile game, World of Neopets. TNT describes it as a “social life-simulation game” where you play as a Neopet, and the game is set to launch next year, according to a video. TNT promises the game will “not be crypto-focused,” which may come as a relief for fans who didn’t like the brand’s foray into NFTs. TNT is also “transitioning away” from its Neopets Metaverse game, which I’ll admit I didn’t even know existed.

The blog post also outlines some of the organizational changes resulting in the new direction. Neopets used to be under the management of JumpStart Games, but JumpStart “has struggled to find success for Neopets” and shut down on June 30th. However, Dominic Law, who apparently played Neopets in the early 2000s, pushed JumpStart parent company NetDragon to save Neopets ahead of the shutdown, and “a management buyout deal was struck” that has allowed Neopets to strike out as an independent company called World of Neopia, Inc. Law heads up the new leadership team.

“The Neopets Team is, for the first time in over a decade, equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance,” TNT says in the blog post. Moving forward, the team is promising monthly updates, regular AMAs, and a brand ambassador program — the latter of which will launch in “the next couple of months.”

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Neopets is promising a 'new era' with an improved website and fixed Flash games - The Verge
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