When World of Neopia formed to buy out popular virtual pet website Neopets in 2023, the team – which comprised Neopets veterans and newcomers – had a mess on their hands.
Neopets had been operating at a loss for over a decade and engagement numbers had plummeted. Worse, the team was dealing with a partially broken website thanks to the 2020 removal of support for Adobe Flash Player, as well as the reputational damage from the prior owner’s decision to kickstart a Neopets metaverse and NFT project.
The cleanup began almost immediately. World of Neopia cancelled the planned metaverse and NFT plans. Then, it set about rebuilding the website.
The focus was on the brand and IP, and working out what it meant for players. In a micro-talk at SXSW Sydney 2025, new CEO Dominic Law shared the thinking, saying the team understood the value of Neopets and believed it wasn’t a website destined to be shut down and forgotten. After all, Law used to be a player – in fact, he adopted his first Neopet when he was 12.
Neopets revival – quick links
A new Neopets for fans, built by fans
‘It was my first online game and it’s game that I used to connect with my childhood friends in Canada,’ Law said at SXSW Sydney 2025. ‘It was also the game that made me a cool kid in Hong Kong because I played it a year earlier than most of my peers, so I accumulated wealth. I had nicer pets, nicer items, and when people started playing in Hong Kong…I [was] already ahead of the curve.’
As Law detailed, it was a ‘big’ part of his childhood. That formed part of the reason why he wanted to revive the brand and ensure its longevity for years to come. In a candid admission, Law noted there were ample challenges facing Neopets after years of stagnation. While it was massively popular in the early 2000s, it hadn’t held onto that momentum through the 2010s and 2020s.
‘There was a lack of strategy, a lack of investment, a lot of cost-cutting, and eventually things [entered] maintenance mode,’ Law said. While there were some initiatives in pursuit of growth, they didn’t honour player interests and there wasn’t a real push to create new, inspiring reasons to continue engaging with the website.
In 2023, after multiple buy outs and acquisitions, and with multiple companies at the helm that didn’t understand what made Neopets special, World of Neopia formed with a goal to push the website forward and appeal to a modern audience.
As Law described, when the company formally acquired Neopets, the state of the website was sad.
‘It’s a 25-year-old tech stack. The game is broken. It’s built on Flash and it’s on maintenance mode. There’s a lot of bugs. There’s probably more bugs than things you can actually play with,’ he said. ‘There’s no goal, there’s no strategy on maintenance mode, it’s barely on a lifeline.’
‘So, the first thing we did was come up with a three-pillar strategy.’
Planning the Neopets revival
World of Neopia determined there were three core goals to work towards if they were going to have any hope of renewing conversations around Neopets. Those goals were: fixing the website; building trust; and empowering the Neopets community.
The first goal was the most complex. With the death of Adobe Flash Player, so many parts of Neopets became inaccessible or fundamentally broken. So many pages led nowhere and mini-games that helped players earn Neopoints were no longer available.
While some pages built on HTML survived, it was clear to both players and World of Neopia that something had to change. So, bit by bit, the team began restoring the website.
Speaking to ScreenHub post-panel, Law admitted this process was one of the most difficult aspects of reviving Neopets. With so much broken, it wasn’t likely everything could be fixed, even with time and effort.
Neopets launched in 1999. After decades of coding and multiple changeovers – with poor documentation between some transitions – it was clear the task of revamping the entirety of Neopets was enormous.
Understanding the scale of the problem, the team eventually focused on providing the best new content possible – new plots, new collectibles and more lore.
‘The first strategy was to fix what matters to [our core audience base, the ones who kept Neopets alive] and that meant bringing back over 100 mini-games and overhauling major systems like login, CS payment, and almost everything the site needs,’ Law said. ‘We’re doing it bit by bit, to make sure that the game continues to be playable and hopefully it’s getting more enjoyable.’
As part of this commitment, the Neopets team have vowed to make more frequent community updates to ensure players feel part of the website’s journey.
Merchandising and marketing the world of Neopets
The team also began work on the other key pillars of its strategy, building trust and empowering community through new opportunities, teaming with ACMI on a major historical video games exhibit and releasing new merchandise that allowed people to indulge in their fandom.
As Law noted, despite shedding the bulk of its audience base over the years, there is still a strong nostalgia and love for Neopets, particularly from those millennials who grew up playing it, perhaps as their first taste of the modern internet. The characters and world of the game still have cultural cachet, and World of Neopia leaned on this through a variety of brand partnerships as well as physical events.
‘We make fandom tangible,’ Law said.
While developers have worked to fix the website, World of Neopia has hosted an array of meetups around Neopets birthdays and other celebrations, as well as visiting other countries to share more about what’s next.
‘We go to conferences. We also create collab events so that you can experience and consume Neopets in a real-life setting,’ Law said. ‘A lot of these [events] are more targeted at reminding users about Neopets and the fun and joy they once had. Even though they might not come back and play the nostalgic game, they can experience Neopets in a different way.’
All of these efforts are about transforming Neopets into a ‘trans-generational, trans-media’ property where lapsed players can recognise and reminisce about their childhood, whether that’s in the form of a plush toy, a pin or clothing.
World of Neopia is building all this around ‘key characters’ – Shoyru, Acara, JubJub and Grundo, to name a few – elevating these as icons of the website and inviting players to engage with them in the game and via merchandise.
‘We have the IP, we have the brand awareness, but we don’t have the relevance,’ Law said, detailing the company’s goals to expand the recognition of Neopets. ‘So we build it back to relevance, prove our demand, and then use licensing strategy to become our market flywheel.’
Currently, World of Neopia is working with a range of partners to expand its IP into new avenues – publishing, toy making, tabletop game making and more – to heighten Neopets’ relevance and secure new and returning players.
To date, it appears the strategy is working. Per Law, Neopets currently has more than 150 million registered users and 400,000 monthly active users, which represents a tripling of its growth.
‘This is still at the very beginning of a grand revival,’ Law said.
He add that Neopets was once as popular as Roblox is now – and while there was a fall from grace over the past two decades, growth was possible. World of Neopia seems well-equipped to make it happen so that players of all generations can discover, or rediscover, why Neopets remains an important website.
