When I was 12 or so, I remember hanging out in a corner of browser-based virtual pet game Neopets known as “Evil Things and Monster Sightings” or “EMS,” and pledging to some internet strangers that I’d never, ever quit Neopets. We’d be friends forever.
EMS was a messageboard ostensibly set up for users of Neopets to report, I don’t know, sightings of monsters around the website? The game’s story villains? The purpose was always unclear, unlike other on-site messageboards that had actual utility. But as a result, awkward teens and pre-teens (fudging their birthdays to access the board ahead of turning 13) gathered on EMS to chat about, well, everything. We made friends, talked about life and the stupid crap our parents were saying. We roleplayed, a lot, about dragons and magic and wolves and whatever other goofy stuff we thought was cool. At the time, I thought the friends I made there would be my friends forever. They knew all my deepest feelings and secrets and had shared theirs with me – how could we be separated?
And then we were. At some point that I can’t specifically remember, I stopped visiting Neopets. I had certainly quit by the time I was in high school, leaving my very cool handle “goldensun4747” behind and my pets to starve. Nothing in particular caused my departure – I just grew up and found other things to do. And so did millions of others like me. Over the last 25 years, Neopets players arrived, made friends, invested a good chunk of our formative years, and then faded away as either we, or Neopets itself, changed with time.
Current Neopets CEO Dominic Law is one of those individuals for whom Neopets was a haven at a critical time in his life. He grew up with Neopets, getting into it as a kid while living in Canada and continuing to play when his family moved to Hong Kong. Neopets was more than a game – it helped him stay in touch with his friends back home. And like many others, with time, Law drifted away.
But unlike me, Law came back – because Neopets, despite the steady exodus of active users, never really died. It was owned by Viacom from 2005 to 2014, and then acquired by JumpStart Games in 2014 which was itself acquired by NetDragon in 2017. Throughout that period, Neopets suffered. Bugs and lag plagued the site; moderation tools failed. The site hemorrhaged users. Though it saw a brief resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this didn’t last. In 2020, Adobe concluded its support for Flash, rendering most of Neopets’ beloved minigames unplayable. During this time, NetDragon hired Law – who had been working in private equity – as its director of new markets, later promoting him to chief metaverse officer of Neopets. And in that role, as Neopets floundered, Law led a push to implement Web3 into that backfired spectacularly.
With Neopets on its last legs and user sentiment and trust in the toilet, Law made a bold move. He bought Neopets from NetDragon, making himself the new CEO, and kicked off what he promised would be a “new era” for the game. Neopets, he claimed, had been mismanaged for years, but Law had $4 million in investment money to revamp it. He would fix its broken games and bugs, improve its moderation tools, and restore Neopets to “the glory days” he and millions of others remembered from adolescence. And this time, he promised, no blockchain.
Ambassadors to Neopia
It’s been almost a year since Law unveiled his grand strategy, and to hear him tell it at the Game Developers Conference last month, things are going pretty well. Sure, it’s a far cry from its glory days still. Neopets has 150 million registered users from the totality of its 25-year history, but currently only has about one million annual active users. Still, Law says those active users are really active. Many have been playing for over 10 or even 15 years and stuck around through the worst days of the company. They’re few, but mighty.
That’s why Law is determined to engage them and use that community power to make Neopets better. In his GDC talk, “Working with the Community to Revive a Nostalgic IP: ‘Neopets’,” Law explains how he implemented a community ambassador program to help the company better connect with the one million active users it serves. First, Neopets ran an application and selection process to identify ten community ambassadors (out of around 1000 applications) who knew the game inside and out, and were already deeply engaged with the people playing it. Some of the chosen ten run big Neopets fan sites, manage social media groups, or regularly write guides to certain Neopets features that the community relies upon.
Then, with the ten selected, it was time to get to work.
“The key roles and responsibilities of our community ambassadors are actually quite demanding, to be honest,” Law says. “First of all, it’s community management and interaction. These community ambassadors actually help us gather community sentiments, insights, and even collect issues. As we provide updates to the game and introduce new features, these community ambassadors actually help us. They provide us actionable feedback on what we should develop. And whenever we have in-game events or even in real life events, they actually help us to do event coordination. They advocate and they promote the events for us.”
The key roles and responsibilities of our community ambassadors are quite demanding.Law goes on to explain that community ambassadors meet monthly with Neopets staff, both to provide insights from the communities themselves and receive, from Neopets, updates on new features or fixes coming soon and roadmaps for long-term changes. Neopets also engaged them in community moderation, with Law telling me that the company relies on ambassadors to report and accelerate serious issues that otherwise would get lost in the ticket system. It sounds like a lot of work! In a Q&A following Law’s talk, an audience member probed this practice, asking how their time was respected and if there were pathways to compensation in the future. I asked Law a similar question later, in a one-on-one interview.
In both cases, Law pointed out that it was actually the community ambassadors who want to do more work. “We definitely want to make sure that we don’t abuse the relationship,” he says. “A lot of these community ambassadors, before joining, we made sure they understand what they’re getting into. And a lot of them actually spend a lot of time at Neopets on their own, even before joining the program. And then they’re actually seeing that this is a much more efficient way for them to express their love and passion in a way that’s more organized. They actually, originally, the ambassadors suggested bi-weekly updates, and then we actually pushed back and said, ‘No, that’s too frequent. We don’t want to have so much work. We don’t want to overburden our ambassadors.’”
Law does not respond to the question about paths to future compensation, and notes they’re looking to expand the program and bring on more ambassadors in the future. He tells me the current group of ambassadors are committed for a year, and will participate in one-on-one feedback sessions at the end to determine what worked well, and what did not. He describes this as “kind of like your 360 review within the company.”
“We actually treat our committee ambassadors as a part of the team,” he says. Neopets has between 50-60 actual employees, a number that includes outsourcing, freelancers, and employees working on projects other than the website.
Growth Without Growth
Alongside its community ambassador program, Neopets is also working to rebuild trust via other avenues. Law says the team holds monthly Q&A sessions with the community, fixes bugs, conducts surveys to learn what features need prioritizing, and is working to integrate community-run projects (such as dress-up tool Dress to Impress) into the Neopets website proper. There’s also a need to improve Neopets’ moderation tools. Right now, it runs on a fairly strict text filter, but Law says the team is looking into AI tech or updating the entire system to keep the worst of the internet at bay long-term.
But Law recognizes that all this is really just to keep the current one million active users happy. It’s not about growth. Current users want to see Neopets’ broken elements get fixed. Lapsed users want to see updates in keeping with the current structure of the site. But no one, according to Law, is really clamoring for a full website revamp. And that’s okay.
“I think the majority of the 140 million lapsed users, they kind of like the IP,” he says. “They have the emotional attachment, they have the childhood memory. They might come back for nostalgia, but they probably don’t care as much if the classic game is revived. Would they play? They might come back for it to relive their childhood experience for a day or two, but they probably won’t be long-time users.”
He’s right, at least anecdotally. Shortly before the panel at GDC, I made a new account on Neopets and poked my head in. Everything was just as I remembered it. The Giant Omelet was still glistening in the Tyrannian sun. Shoyrus were still everyone’s favorite. Paintbrushes and Neggs were still the ultimate hotness. All the aesthetics I remembered were still in place. But when I visited the messageboards, there were no familiar names. Why would there be? It’s been 20 years. I logged out after about 30 minutes, and didn’t come back.
That’s okay, says Law. I’m not the target demographic here. People like me “probably graduated from Neopets for all the right reasons.”
“To be honest, we’re not getting that many new users,” Law continues. “We don’t really have the budget to do a lot of marketing to attract new users. And even if new users come play, it’s probably too vast of an environment, they’ll get lost. So we’re targeting to attract lapsed users coming back to the game, and most specifically the recent lapsed users that they’re still playing Neopets probably within the past three to five years. So they left Neopets [because of] the lack of updates, they got upset, they feel neglected.”
But that doesn’t mean Law is ignoring the power of new or long-lapsed users. He just doesn’t think the website is the way to hook them in. For those groups, Law is looking to other forms of media. For instance, later this year, Neopets is launching a new TCG through Upper Deck. It’s got a Monopoly game coming, new plushes, and collectibles. And most importantly, Neopets is working on new games. Two mobile titles are already in the works, and Law says he wants to do a console game eventually too – perhaps a reimagining of The Darkest Faerie.
To be honest, we’re not getting that many new users.Which brings Law back around to the website. Even if users don’t stick around, it’s important to have the retro Neopets experience still functional online somewhere. If someone like me comes back, looks around for 30 minutes, and leaves, that’s fine. But by the end of that, I should know there are other Neopets experiences out in the world and want to engage with them. It’s all fueled by nostalgia.
Elsewhere in our conversation, Law expresses disdain for the microtransaction-heavy, “gambling-driven” economies he sees in the gaming industry, especially in the mobile segment. When he mentions this, I ask him about his ventures into Web3. Is that part of it? Would he ever try to reintroduce blockchain or NFTs to Neopets after the community backlash? Law says no. He’s learned from his mistakes, and Web3 is fundamentally at odds with the users Neopets needs to survive – whose love for the game is very much tied to Web2.0 wistfulness.
“Web2 gamers in general, not just Neopets players, actually don’t really care about Web3 gaming. At the end of the day, it is too much of just gambling and it’s not really about the fun of the game. I think that really kills the entertainment of playing a game, in essence, and I think that’s the major clash.”
I point out that he’s actively fundraising. What happens when investors start asking him to lay the monetization on thicker? Law believes he can hold his ground, thanks to the example set by the community the first time he tried Web3.
“Our investors who previously believed in the Web3 story, they actually believe in the much broader revival of the Neopets IP,” he says. “And they see that what we’re doing is definitely on the right track. It’s much more important for us to revive the IP than try to build a game that no one will play.”
Somehow, for 25 years, Neopets has clung to life despite bugs, multiple acquisitions, technological failures, and the loss of most of its users. Law’s vision for Neopets, then, is neither to transform the website into some sort of fantastical “Neopets 2.0,” nor is it to discard the ancient browser game altogether. It’s all about IP, and putting Neopets in front of as many people as possible, in as many different forms as he can.
Will multiple mobile games, a TCG, plushes, a Monopoly game, and whatever else the company is cooking up be enough to make Neopets the “number-one virtual pet companionship IP,” as Law hopes? Maybe. I’ll set a reminder on my calendar for 25 years from now: “Check in on EMS and see how things are going.” If Law and Neopets achieve their goals, I’ll still be able to do just that.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
