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By Délia Cai
In July, a small ripple echoed across the internet, faintly perceptible to the incredibly connected millennial type who can still hear the faint tone of a phone line echoing through their formative memories. The news was niche, but it had indescribable emotional significance: Neopuppys, the virtual browser puppy game and touchstone of the web of the 2000s, had returned.
Technically, the site never left. After being introduced in 1999 through two British developers and cultivating an audience of 25 million active users at its peak in the mid-2000s, Neopets has a cultural reference among young people developing in Web 1. 0 for its healthy and elaborate universe (and complicated environment). . economies that have evolved in and around the site). The site was not without controversy: parents were involved over the use of “immersive advertising” and, at one point, the site’s business practices were directly similar to those of Scientology, according to The Outline. Arguably Neopets’ greatest legacy has been to help exercise young minds (and the next generation of online platforms) in the addictive desire to connect to foster genuine relationships or not. In 2005, after Viacom bought Neopets for $160 million, Wired reported that the site was the most attractive on the Internet, “ahead of Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and eBay. “
Then its user base aged and evolved, and the company replaced hands several times. Until this summer, Neopets was owned through the Chinese company NetDragon Websoft, where it languished; while in recent years they have remained around 100,000 daily active users. The death sentence seemed all but guaranteed once Adobe Flash Player shut down in 2020, leaving much of the Neopets site unusable. Then there’s the ill-fated attempt in 2021 to sell NFT through Neopets Metaverse, which drew the ire of the remaining diehard and nostalgic millennials.
Enter Dominic Law, 36, a Harvard Business School graduate and NetDragon worker who became interested in the game’s logo that played such an important role in his formative years spent in Toronto and Hong Kong. After joining Neopets as Neopets’ Director of Metaverse, and witnessing firsthand the NFT launch debacle (and enduring fan fervor), Law led the team that negotiated a control buyout of NetDragon and placed Neopets under the dominance of the new World of Neopia Inc. last July.
Since then, Law has spread the message that the Neopets’ glory days are near; At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, a booth and corporate party promised to deliver a veritable explosion of “Neostalgia. “Whether temperamental millennials (and their descendants) are drawn to return to Neopia after what turns out to be 50 lifetimes later is a matter of time. Another story. Below, Law and I talk about the unfortunate NFT movement, as well as his aspirations for the next few decades in Neopets gaming.
Ours has been edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair: You started playing Neopets when you were about 12 years old. What is your favorite activity in Neopia?
Dominic Law: I’ve used Neoboards a lot and NeoMail. Me first joined Neopets one summer, when I came back to Toronto to visit them, and my friends invited me to play. So, for me, it feels more like a social network. platform.
Why do you think NFTs didn’t work? You were the head of the metaverse at the time, weren’t you?
When we launched the NFT collection, I wasn’t worried about intellectual property yet: it was a third-party solution provider that brought us in. I’m sure you’ve probably heard about the reaction and all the setbacks we’ve had. After the initial release of NFT, I was tasked with cleaning it up and getting it back on track. We definitely started on the wrong side with the community, pushing too many of those NFTs and having pretty poor execution.
But also, since Netdragon acquired Neopets — and even before that, I think for a decade — it’s been a very poorly managed brand. It’s declining. We hadn’t taken care of many things that deserved to have been fixed. The mini-games, storylines, and much of the fun disappeared overnight when The Flash shut down in December 2020; They announced it a few years ago and we never planned for it. So that’s a lot of what the network felt was betrayed.
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But also, in the Web3 area in general, there hasn’t been any game with good luck in terms of really fun and entertaining games. There’s a lot of luck in that gaming focuses much more on cryptocurrencies and hype, but those things are pretty much at odds with the gaming industry, which focuses more on entertainment and the price of laughter. On the media side, there is a sense that Web3 is, I would say, very capitalist. And for many people, it’s not like that in the area of gaming. On the right track.
Do you think Neopets could move to Web3 one day?
I wouldn’t say I’m disappointed. On the positive side, this Web3 assignment has given me the opportunity to collaborate much more with the rest of the Neopets team and realize that we can do much more. That’s what convinced me to come up with a business plan to review. and change things up and actually rebuild Neopets to its glory days.
But can you build a sustainable business out of this nostalgia for the Internet?
I think so, especially since Neopets is one of the first browser games and one of the few that has lasted almost 24 years. The network is very strong; People have strong memories of their formative years. The awareness of the logo is there.
I mean, a lot of other people think that Neopets died many years ago. The thing is, we never left, but we didn’t grow or replace much. So, it’s time to rekindle that interest and get our former users to come back and interact with the IP. We see a lot of hope. Even in the last few months, since our team took full control in July, we have again reached a five-year high in terms of monthly active users, share, and user revenue.
Our users have this emotional bond with their Neopets. Do they go back to greeting their friends from their formative years?It is a very exclusive attraction. For other people who left five or ten years ago, it’s probably hard to go back and stay clinging. That’s why we also made the decision that we needed to create new reports and games that would excite inactive users. So, IP excites them and they come back for nostalgic reasons, but there’s a lot more to them that stays with us than that. We are looking to revive intellectual assets in the sense that we are licensing and commercializing, where replaced users could interact more with us on a physical level. They can buy a piece of memory from those formative years and interact with intellectual property in real life.
In a way, the lack of repositioning in Neopets over the decades may simply be an advantage. There are very few places on the web where you can find a position from your formative years that is still intact.
I agree. Between five and 10% of our users are now children, and what we have found is that many of those children play because their parents played Neopets in the past. It is inevitable that the younger generation will play online games, and if they could play anything their parents played in the past, there would be a secure emotional connection that they would discover in other games.
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What are your ambitions for the logo? I’m thinking of Pokémon Go in terms of a beloved gaming logo that’s adapted to new technologies, but you also talked about Neopets in terms of intellectual property giants like Marvel.
What Barbie has been doing recently, we can find out in this manual. How a nostalgic game [or] IP toy becomes a Hollywood mainstream favorite, that’s a very exciting thing.
Do you have a Neopets movie?
Moving Neopets to the big screen is a purpose we’d like to explore. Or even have a component of Universal Studios, with a Neopets theme park?That would be great.
The Super Mario movie was a huge success, but it’s different because Mario never left. They have evolved a lot over the years. And there are other browser games, such as RuneScape. They continue to wreak havoc; Although they offer new gaming experiences, the original game is what other people like the most. Animal Crossing is, in fact, something we are learning about also since its construction, Neohome is a component of the Neopets game. If we were to evolve mini-games, then Mario Party would make a lot more sense: more multiplayer social mini-games. But I would say the short-term effort is to fix the original site.
Will subscription style play a big role in recovery?Is the goal for everyone to access Neopets Premium?
I would argue that Premium, in its current state, is more aimed at a user organization. The style of licenses and products could play a bigger role, because we have wonderful intellectual assets: a lot of likeable characters. We have wonderful traditions, we have more than 18 lands in the world of Neopia. There are many stories to tell. It’s possible that Neopets will simply expand into its own cinematic universe.
Online, there is this recurring clash between platforms and their user bases. Reddit and Tumblr have clashed with the communities that have made them so wonderful; This is also what happens with X (formerly Twitter). As you lead Neopets into the future, what’s your philosophy to make sure that doesn’t happen?
I don’t forget that staying true to the basics was something taught in business schools. I think it’s the same case of Neopets. Our center is this original game of Neopets. com. We can grow in other areas, but making sure we stay true to our core visitor base, as well as the core DNA of what our logo and intellectual assets stand for, is a very vital component for us to lay the groundwork to build on that foundation. . . The total task of Web3 was a bit far from the kernel.
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