You might have played Tamagotchi before, but for some of us who grew up in the early 2000s, we went for Neopets.

Founded in 1999, Neopets is an immersive, web-based pet game where we raise our virtual pets, collect free items under the Money Tree, and of course, haggle for goods with virtual shopkeepers and get chased off for making an unreasonable bargain. 

The online game was a hit back then. According to Mashable, the game saw 25 million users at its peak. A lot has changed since, and Mashable said the firm saw daily active users worldwide shrunk to just 100,000 by 2017. 

Some of the mini-games on the website have also become unplayable after the discontinuation of the Adobe Flash Software in 2020. 

Internally, the firm has also seen multiple changes to its ownership, from being owned by Viacom, the parent company of Nickelodeon, in 2005, to JumpStart Games in 2014, and thereafter by NetDragon after it acquired JumpStart Games.

And when JumpStart Games closed this June, the firm became independent after an undisclosed management buyout deal.

Its new management now wants to change things up by restoring minigames and doubling down on the use of intellectual property in merchandise. It wants to bring lapsed players back into Neopia, and capitalise on the nostalgia former users had for Neopets. 

But how sustainable is nostalgia as a value proposition, and will it be heyday again for Neopets?

On Under the Radar, The Evening Runway’s finance presenter Chua Tian Tian posed these questions to Dominic Law, CEO, Neopets.