The once-popular virtual pet game Neopets is making an effort to become relevant once again by dipping into the controversial world of NFTs. Framed as "digital memorabilia," the NFT collection will feature virtual pets for interested players to purchase.
Neopets, first launched in 1999, is an iconic example of early browser-based games. Similar to a Tamagotchi, players collect and maintain the health of virtual pets as well as participate in minigames to earn in-game items.
The collection will feature 20,500 virtual pets for players to purchase, all of them generated by an algorithm. Details on the pets beyond their generation are left vague, but the message conveyed is clear. Partnering with Raydium, JumpStart Games will be selling NFTs of the pets, with buyers essentially paying real-life money to supposedly own a unique Neopet. The price has not been revealed yet, but the short yet storied history of expensive video game NFTs indicates they could be costly.
Non-Fungible Tokens, known as NFTs, have become the source of heated debate in gaming recently as developers and publishers large and small jump on the trend. NFTs themselves are well known to take massive amounts of power to create, leaving destructive environmental consequences in their wakes. On top of the damage caused, the way NFTs are structured means the item itself cannot be sold; a NFT is essentially a certificate that indicates the buyer owns said item.
If the NFT vendor's servers go down, there is no longer a way to prove that the NFT is linked to the product. Applying this to a player economy that has devolved into a virtual pet black market could be troublesome, as it introduces yet another real-money avenue through the service.
The launch of the NFTs is indicated for mid-October, so the event will not take long to set in motion. Longtime players may be disappointed with the decision to participate in such an environmentally destructive trend, and the negative response even prompted a confirmation post from the official Neopets Twitter account due to some readers assuming the press release was fake. The continuing decisions by large game developers like SEGA to participate in NFTs is becoming a difficult moral debate for players, as buying games from such publishers is to some degree funding these ventures.
NFTs have been confusing and frustrating the gaming community ever since they took off, with some NFT-based products even stealing art from indie developers. and while their popularity seems to be dying down, it appears there may still be some time before they disappear entirely. Until then, major game developers and publishers' unpredictable ventures may lead more down this harmful path.
Source: PR Newswire