I don't know what to do with this information so I'm putting it here.
The bizarre corporate lore of Neopets:
- Built by a university student in England in 1997 to keep students entertained and make a few bucks from banner ads
- An American businessman bought a majority share in 1999 after the site went viral and incorporated it, but turned out to be secretly using Scientology's Org Board to run the company and was trying to make Neopets a scientology thing. Original founders intervened to stop it from becoming a Scientology education site.
- Viacom purchased Neopets for $160 million in 2005 and the founders left due to "creative differences." There were partnerships with FIFA, T-Mobile, Nickelodeon, and a Korean gaming company.
- JumpStart Games acquired Neopets from Viacom in 2014, then laid off most of the team. The server migration was a mess, including site forums (mainly used by kids) getting flooded with extremely inappropriate and sexually explicit messages.
- They tried to launch a NFT project in 2021 but the Neopets community revolted against it because they didn't like the idea of NFTs and giving IP to crypto investors (for environmental reasons, apparently?).
- Jumpstart Games announced it would cease all of its operations in 2023. NetDragon did a buyout of Neopets in 2023 and put it on a path to profitability after the site operated at a loss for over a decade.
Other interesting facts:
- For a community that has rejected crypto, Neopets has long embraced an alternative currency. There is an economy within the game based on "Neopoints" which can be exchanged for "Neocash" which also allows them to purchase "Style Tokens" which are "wearables" for the digital pets. Users can also buy and sell stocks in a fictional stock market called NEODAQ (a parody of NASAQ).
- Over 70% of the users are women, reflecting the demographics seen in social networking communities more than what's typically seen in multiplayer online games. It's credited for inspiring girls in the late 90s and early 2000s to design, code, and experiment on the Internet in a safe and anonymous environment. One user said, "Neopets just literally introduce me to the concept of 'you can build a thing on the computer and it shows up on the screen. I had to be 12. I was really young.'"
