The CEO of Neopets, Dominic Law, revealed in a recent interview that the two main reasons behind cancelling the metaverse version of the old-school virtual pet game were market sentiment and community backlash towards Web3, NFTs, and crypto in general.
In the interview with Decrypt, Law states that the community reacted negatively to the development of the now-cancelled Neopets Metaverse, saying that “At this stage, they probably care less about what Web3 is about,” and that there is “a lot of negative connotation for the mass market.”
In an effort to bring the old game back to life, and due to “limited, scare resources,” the company is prioritizing its original website, working on bug fixes and launching a post-Adobe Flash update that’ll make more than 50 Neopets minigames playable. The claim of limited resources from Law is interesting, considering the studio managed to raise $4 million 6 months ago from various crypto-focused investors, including Avalanche’s ecosystem fund and Polygon Ventures. Whether this means that they’re close to running out of all those funds does not seem to have been revealed by Law during the interview.
“Even though we can get new technologies in place, even get new game experiences, but we’re having a crumbling foundation, which wouldn’t work for the IP as a whole. That’s kind of where we’ve leaned in and balanced out the options given the limited, scarce resources that we have.”
Despite cancelling the metaverse version last month, which was in development for about 2 years, the CEO isn’t completely ruling out a potential return to NFTs at some point in the future, saying that “We still believe that there are certain parts of Web3 technologies that could bring a new game experience to our users.” He does however understand the current negative sentiment towards Web3 gaming and thinks that higher-quality NFT games could potentially help in creating a more positive outlook on the nascent industry at some point in the future.
Some of the assets made during the development of Neopets Metaverse will be used in an upcoming new, non-blockchain mobile game, World of Neopets.