I didn't see anybody talking about the news here, so I thought that I could share a summary.

The Neopets Team announced today that they're under new management. They're no longer affiliated with Jumpstart (which announced their closure back in June) or their parent company NetDragon.

In their blog post in the official Neopets Medium page, they confirm that they are now an independent company:

(Dominc Law, worked for NetDragon and was an old school Neopets player. He put together a team to work on saving the brand.)

Also in that blog post the team talks about how they are well aware of the problems the site has been through in the last decade, they acknowledge the lack of resources which resulted in the Neopets website being left broken.

Going ahead, they are going to focus on community requests, such as speeding up the process of Flash Games conversion, clearing up the page conversion backlog, bug fixes, mobile compatibility issues and improving customer support.

Most importantly, in my opinion, they clear up that they WILL NOT go forward with any Metaverse bullshit, and will instead work on creating a game that feels like Neopets:

At this point, they have secured $4M in funding from various (unnamed) investors with additional funding from the management buyout. For the first time in forever, it looks like TNT has the resources they need to move the brand forward. In the blog post, they mention they have already hired developers and artists to work on the fixes the site needs.

From what it looks like, the game will be a mobile social life-simulation, parallel to the current website. We don’t have to worry that neopets.com will be replaced by a mobile app.

As of now, they have announced:

A brand new plot, scheduled for early 2024

A 2 million(!) NeoCash giveaway

More transparency with monthly updates from the team, scheduled AMAs

Neopets will be under the control of a new, unified entity: World of Neopia, Inc - the website will remain the same (neopets.com)

A Brand Ambassador Program

No longer going forward with NFT/Metaverse stuff

At the end, they published a FAQ with some answers that I found to be good and very interesting:

You can read the entire blog post here.

Or watch the YouTube announcement (which is way shorter):

The tone of the wording in the answers is way too dodgey and inappropriate for the history it talks about.  

Instead of directly and plainly addressing the tremendous and numerous problems with the sight’s ownership (continuous art theft, captcha bandaids rendering the customizable parts of the sight unusable, pushing of cryptocurrency, stealing users’ realworld money via un-cancellable premium memberships, to name a few), the language used in the answers here dances around a nebulous concept of “problems”, thus downplaying their seriousness and not accepting any form of accountability for them.  

It comes across as avoiding that there were serious horrible problems with management decisions in the first place and relegates rightful critiques as complaints over small trivial little issues.   Which, I must reiterate, these problems were not.

Then there’s the fact that the new owner was also apparently the head of the metaverse bullshit branch that plagued neopets?  So taking into account the kinds of people who push nfts and crypto are extremely, hostilely obsessed with the spread and acceptance of crypto, and amplifying that to someone who would be in charge of such a movement... Let’s just say the “oh we’re toooooooootally done with nfts” promises here look hollow at best.

@bam-monsterhospital

oh no i can’t believe it