The Neopets developers revealed a few weeks ago that they would no longer be working on a Metaverse game. Many Neopets lovers were not enthusiastic about the prospect of an NFT-based Neopia, so this news came as a pleasant surprise. The topic of “What about those who invested in the Neopets NFTs?” remains unanswered. We were curious about what had transpired and whether or not individuals who still held Neopets NFTs would be rewarded, so we looked into the matter more.
What’s Wrong?
Neopets was acquired by JumpStart Games from Viacom and Nickelodeon in 2014. JumpStart was well known for its instructional video games including “JumpStart Kindergarten” and “Math Blaster.” However, JumpStart had difficulty maintaining its Neopets community over the years, and the service was discontinued on June 30th, 2023.
Dominic Law, the man in charge of the Neopets Metaverse game before it was spun off, made a deal with JumpStart’s parent firm, NetDragon, to spin off the Neopets team. To foster a common dream of creating an immersive, community-driven gaming experience, Neopets announced that it has acquired $4 million in funding from a variety of investors in early 2023. The management buyout has provided TNT with the resources it needs to make substantive improvements to Neopets.
It’s worth noting that Web3 investors including Polygon Ventures, Blizzard Avalanche Ecosystem Fund, and Hashkey Capital contributed significantly to the team’s funding round.
Were the Carpets Yanked?
First of all, let’s say that Neopets has always been one of my favorite online communities. Both the announcement of their NFT initiative and the news that they had gone independent were exciting for me. However, the more we dug into it, the more shady it seemed. What project would give me a lovely frog named “Nimmo” to care for and then send off to brutal wars wouldn’t take money from people, right?
After numerous Twitter complaints, the Neopets team swiftly responded to calm NFT owners’ fears. To quote a tweet from the company’s account on July 17:
“We have repurposed some of the best assets from the Neopets Metaverse game, but we have refocused the core game loop and overall direction. We will keep backing the Web3 community.”
However, what does that entail? The NFT buyers anticipated employing them in the Metaverse. If there is no Metaverse, then Neopets has essentially cheated these buyers out of the primary value of their tokens.
There is now a blanket announcement on the neopetsmeta.io website saying they will “transition away from the Neopets Metaverse game and redistribute those resources to the development of a game that we feel can better reflect our values and vision.” There’s more information available in a Medium piece linked in the message.
They promise benefits for NFT holders that will be made public soon. Some examples of these benefits are “physical merch, NC items, NC, access to IRL events, and more.”
If there wasn’t a metaverse game, would these benefits make up for it? That’s up to the NFT holders.