No. No more kids games. Kids don’t spend well and it’s very difficult to run a kids game. Turns out Kids do mean stuff to each other a lot.
John Smedley, Reddit AMA
Time for another MMO for kids to fall by the wayside. Club Penguin, the 12 year old kids MMO with over 200 million registered users (as of 2013), has been closed by Disney.
We are no strangers to Club Penguin at our house. My daughter was a fan of the game for a stretch and used to participate in events, was in a band in the game, and collected the various in-game items including hats and puffles.
Waddle around
In fact, it was a desire to collect some special in-game item that led my daughter to get her account banned when she gave her login information to a classmate who then gave it to somebody else.
Forever…ever…ever…ever…
That was a serious blow to her relationship with the game, as she had collected quite a bit of stuff. If fact, she recently read that post I wrote about that incident and got mad at me when she realized I could have probably gotten her account unbanned if I had set that as a goal, as opposed to teaching her a lesson in account security. She still misses some of her stuff even though that was half of her lifetime ago. I cannot recall when I was 15 if I was nostalgic for things that happened when I was only 8.
But it really does not matter now as all of her stuff in Club Penguin is gone. Disney announced back in January that the game would be shutting down and yesterday was the last day. Sales have been down, Disney had already laid off some staff and closed down some of the overseas sites for the game, but that was not enough.
In a bit of an ironic turn, at least for our household, getting banned from Club Penguin became a new sport for people playing the game, and my daughter joined in
He last encounter with Club Penguin was trying to get kicked off of Club Penguin. And that fun is over for good as well now that the game has been shut down.
Of course, I am dubious as to how badly Disney needed to shut the game down. The financials are all buried in the numbers for the corporation and we are all pretty aware that online games in motion tend to hang onto a core audience that can keep them viable. I doubt if the game were still independent that it would be closing. But Disney is in the business of growth, not mere viability, so Club Penguin was sent off to join Toontown Online, another acquisition of theirs they subsequently shut down.
Anyway, the real reason to kill Club Penguin was to keep it from drawing customers from Disney’s new mobile venture, Club Penguin Island which, surprise surprise, went live on iOS and Android yesterday.
Penguins go mobile
The plan was obviously to channel Club Penguin player to the new game.
Of course, the usual reactions from the player base occurred, with people angry and threatening boycotts and the like.
Players like to settled down in their MMOs for the long term. They want them to remain so they can come back and visit. They get invested in their virtual goods and hate to lose them. So expecting people to pick up from a long standing MMO to invest in a new game is a faint hope, and all the less likely when you chase them out of the old one with a stick. Sequels are difficult as we saw with EverQuest II and Lineage II, neither of which ever outshined their predecessor.
And when the replacement isn’t even on the same platform… well, that seems like a faint hope.
Not that I think Club Penguin Island will fail. It is a Disney product and will have Disney marketing behind it and will be featured on the Disney channel and on Radio Disney and in the Disney Store and so on and so forth. It is just a completely different beast and will have its own fans and followers who may not have played the original.
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