Neopets Relaunch? A Review

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Neopets is a virtual pet community where you can adopt, customise and play with your virtual buddies. It has been around since 1999 and most of us millennials created an account at some point. 

When I heard Neopets was back with a new ownership that is committed to fixing all the problems, to say I was excited is an understatement. I may be a middle-aged professional with children older than their target market but was that going to stop me? My new marshmallow coloured alien friend proves otherwise. 

First, I want to say that the re-brand and their marketing team have done a fantastic job. There’s been a lot of PR, social media presence, in-game events and competitions for their new merch. As relaunching goes, this has been one of the best I’ve seen and the result is older Neopians flocking back to the site in droves. The community is an important part of any MMO and all social media channels seem to be buzzing with excitement which bodes well for the long term future of the game.

In their short term of office, the new HQ have run the traditional Faerie Festival and Advent Calendar events much bigger than previous years. Faerie Fest granted quests from the fountain faerie, allowing the large new player base to get all the unobtainable, dream pets they’ve wanted since the millennium as well as teasing a new plot, providing exceptional battledome prizes and the usual faerie paint brushes. The Advent Calendar then went on to hand out a variety of popular petpets (pets for your pet), an all new petpetpet (you guessed it, a pet for your pet’s pet) and one of the rarest stamps in the game – for all players! This generosity is sure to keep players interested short term and help them achieve long term goals. 

Unfortunately, despite all the generosity and active site management, the site is plagued with legacy issues. The old flash games are in the process of being converted, most of which are unplayable. There are bugs affecting multiple facets of the site – customisation and trading being the worst affected. To counter this lack of virtual revenue, new daily quests which award 20,000nps every day have been launched and the weekly prizes are exceptional. If they continue to rotate prizes for the weekly pool, the site could overcome these negatives in the mid term but the player base will want to see some progress. 

Most recently, the team have made a bold move in placing the ‘unconverted’ (UC) art (art that pre-dates a 2006 conversion to allow for the creation of wearables) with skins that can be purchased. This new, gatcha-lite system called the Styling Studio, could provide a necessary cash boost or alienate the core player-base who saw their UC pets as a status symbol.

It’s still early days for the Neopets team but at present, things are very encouraging. I wish them well and have high hopes for their future. All that remains for me to say is bring back Key Quest!