Why Did Club Penguin Disappear? What Caused It to Close?

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A massively multiplayer online game called Club Penguin let players take on the roles of penguin characters who could access different games, chat with other players, and adopt pets.

Due to the persistent decline in player interest in the game, which almost certainly resulted in a substantial drop in revenue, Club Penguin was shut down.

Club Penguin: What Was It?

Users could play as penguins in the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) Club Penguin. Then, a player’s character could play various games, go into a (chat) room, and even get a pet (called puffles).

Children between the ages of six and fourteen were the target market for the game. Older players, however, were not prohibited from using it.

Additionally, players had the option to customise their penguin characters. For instance, you could buy extra clothing in the game to change how a penguin looked.

These add-ons could be purchased with in-game coins, which users could acquire by playing particular games, finishing tasks, or competing.

Additionally, players had the option of joining, which gave them access to a variety of items like clothing and games. If users wanted to join Club Penguin, they had to pay a monthly subscription fee.

Only a certain number of players could play on each server because the game was split up into servers. Club Penguin set a 300 player cap on a server.

Club Penguin regularly held gatherings and events that were themed around a particular subject (such as New Year’s Day) in order to encourage player interaction.

Most people used web browsers to access and play the game. Later, mobile and tablet applications for both Android and iOS were made available.

What Has Happened To Club Penguin?

Lane Merrifield, Dave Krysko, and Lance Priebe founded Club Penguin in 2005; it was formerly based in Kelowna, Canada.

All three of Club Penguin’s founders had accumulated a wealth of gaming industry experience prior to its launch.

Particularly Lance Priebe experienced his fair share of setbacks. He started working on Snow Blasters, a penguin-based online snowball war game, in July 2000.

Priebe was inspired to include penguins when he came across a cartoon depicting a penguin tripping over a banana in the neighbourhood newspaper. Additionally, animating penguins was generally simple, which sped up the development process.

Snow Blasters, sadly, never got anywhere. Instead, he started to make progress on a different game called Experimental Penguins. A few weeks after his employer RocketSnail Games, who also employed Krysko (Priebe’s actual boss), released the game.

Again, experimental penguins never really caught on. A year after its release, the game was altered, but it ultimately served as the basis for another game. Soon after, RocketSnail unveiled Penguin Chat, which essentially turned Experimental Penguins into a new game.

The game was updated and released as Penguin Chat 2 and Penguin Chat 3, respectively, in the ensuing years. The games themselves were moderately popular, drawing more than a million players in total.

All of these games, however, had one significant flaw in common: nobody thought kids should play them. The three founders were particularly interested in finding a solution to the safety issue because they all had children of their own.

Many websites at the time, especially popular ones like Friendster, were plagued by banner ads that looked shady (since this was the only way for many of them to generate any meaningful revenue).

The decision was made to approach their boss Krysko with the idea of founding a spinoff company to create this safer version by Merrifield, who had been hired in early 2005, and Priebe. They added New Horizon Interactive a few weeks later.

Sometime in 2005, the initial development work for what would eventually become Club Penguin began. An expansion of Penguin Chat 3, which was released in April 2005 and was internally known as Penguin Chat 4, the game was called Penguin Chat 4.

To gauge the capacity of the server, they released the first beta version of the game on August 22, 2005. For that testing event, Penguin Chat was able to draw in about 15,000 players because they already had a devoted fan base. On October 24th, 2005, they finally released Club Penguin, two months after that.

The game literally took off like wildfire. A little over a year after its debut, in November 2006, Club Penguin was already drawing more than 2 million players each month. To keep the website free from banner ads, they had in the interim turned down lucrative advertising offers from companies like Google.

The majority of the site’s growth was simply the result of word-of-mouth, such as parents talking to one another or kids persuading their friends to join. The game was also shared on Miniclip.com, a well-known collection of free online games at the time, which helped increase adoption. Movies like Happy Feet also aided in its expansion.

By May 2007, rumours that several businesses were interested in buying the bootstrapped company responsible for the game started to circulate. Next to Facebook and Myspace, Club Penguin was one of the most widely used social networks at the time.

Then, in August, a few months later, these rumours came to pass. Disney acquired Club Penguin’s parent company New Horizon Interactive for a staggering $350 million in cash and $350 million in earnouts, contingent upon achieving specific performance metrics.

They were able to divide the $350 million equally between themselves because the business was entirely bootstrapped with the founder’s personal funds. Similar to the money they made from Club Penguin, 10% of the proceeds ($35 million) went to foundations they backed.

Although the acquisition price was high, it had some justification. At the time of the acquisition, Club Penguin had 12 million active users, 700,000 paying subscribers, and revenue projections for 2007 of $65 million (on profits of $35 million).

The game’s rebranding to Disney’s Club Penguin was the only thing that changed. The purchase was a component of Disney’s larger digitalization strategy, which also included investments, acquisitions, and management of a number of gaming and social networking sites geared toward kids.

Disney’s investment, however, also sparked a flurry of copycat platforms that were all successful to varying degrees. However, it ultimately had an impact on Club Penguin’s growth, which stalled for months after the acquisition.

The difficulties in the game were also being exacerbated by two additional macro trends. For once, the recession’s effects on the economy caused many parents to revoke their subscriptions. Second, mobile-based games have become more popular than classic browser games since the release of the iPhone.

Disney responded to this trend in part by launching a version of Club Penguin for the Nintendo DS in December 2008.

Unfortunately, there was not enough of a change in the market for Club Penguin to reach its earnings goals. The founders consequently failed to achieve the profit thresholds necessary to qualify for the second $350 million payment. Krysko and Priebe both left Disney in 2010 due to declining interest and a lack of opportunities for profit.

Merrifield, a self-described “Disney nut” whose first job involved working in the parades at Disneyland, continued on to serve as the Senior Vice President in charge of Disney’s Interactive division.

The game made a very interesting mistake in June 2011. Disney reportedly neglected to renew the game’s domain name, which caused the website to become unavailable for a short period of time.

It finally released its first mobile app for the iPhone in September of that same year, charging $0.99 for it. But in reality, it was a game called Puffle Launch and not Club Penguin. The game used Club Penguin’s beloved puffles as weapons and was eerily similar to Angry Birds (similar to the various birds in Angry Birds).

More than 150 million accounts were registered across all Club Penguin games by October 2011. Disney had hired about 200 content moderators who were watching the game’s chats to protect the children from predators. The game made a very interesting mistake in June 2011. Disney reportedly neglected to renew the game’s domain name, which caused the website to become unavailable for a short period of time.

Disney kept putting money into the game, launching a physical Club Penguin magazine in the United Kingdom in February 2012 and creating digital penguin characters based on Marvel superheroes (June 2012).

Merrifield, a co-founder, also made the decision to leave the business despite the investments the company had made. He formally turned the keys over to longtime Disney executive Chris Heatherly in October 2012.

200 million people had registered accounts for the game, but play gradually dwindled. When Heatherly took over, monthly traffic dropped from 8.5 million in December 2009 to 3.3 million.

Due in large part to the parents’ willingness to pay the monthly subscription fees, Club Penguin continued to be a financially successful game despite the decline in player numbers. As a result, Disney kept adding fresh events, like a Star Wars-themed one in July 2013.

Disney finally released an app-based version of Club Penguin available on smartphones and tablets in December 2013, which many people thought was too late. Club Penguin continued to generate a sizable sum of money consistently over the ensuing years.

Many of the game’s devoted fans found the closure to be a sad day, but the game’s creators did end it on a happy note. Players had been spreading rumours about an iceberg in the map’s corner for years. Whether it could be turned around if enough players stood on one side was theorised.

Through a trivia contest, the game’s creators eventually disclosed how to tip it. The message read, “Together, we can build an island, create a community, change the world… even tip an iceberg,” was discovered by the players who were able to complete the task. shuffle on.

The game’s successor, Club Penguin Island, didn’t endure as long as the adored original. Disney declared that it would end the game immediately in September 2018.

It’s interesting to note that the closure led to the creation of several knockoff games, such as Club Penguin Rewritten or Club Penguin Online. This was made possible because the game’s creators were able to locate old Club Penguin files and release a nearly identical version of it.

The copycats themselves lacked virtually all forms of content moderation and neither had language filters, which distinguished them from the original game. These games were not created with safety in mind, either.

For instance, Club Penguin Rewritten experienced a data breach in August 2019 that resulted in the exposure of four million user accounts. A prior hacking attempt in January 2018 had compromised 1.7 million accounts.

Disney made the decision to submit a DMCA takedown request as a result, and in May 2020 the copycat website Club Penguin Online (located at cponline.pw), which had gathered more than 8 million users, was shut down.

Despite being taken down, the other imitation websites kept getting more and more popular. Particularly in 2020, millions of former players who were now enrolled in college returned to the game. Many people used it to communicate with others while confined to their homes.

Unexpectedly, Club Penguin Rewritten, the most well-liked spin-off, was discontinued in April 2022. Instead, a City of London Police logo with the words “This site has been taken over by Operation Creative, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU)” was displayed to users.

Three site members were detained, and they are currently being investigated for distributing copyright material. The game’s Discord server, which had more than 140,00 users, was also shut down at the same time.

But once more, not long after, a fresh version known as New Club Penguin appeared. Upon logging in, the new website now immediately welcomes users and informs them that it is not related to Disney.

What Caused Club Penguin to Close?

Due to the persistent decline in player interest in the game, which almost certainly resulted in a substantial drop in revenue, Club Penguin was shut down.

The primary cause was Club Penguin’s (and Disney’s) inability to change with the times and focus on mobile. Many of its seasoned players started flocking to social media sites like Instagram or Facebook around the turn of the decade to stay in touch with their friends.

Additionally, mobile devices, rather than web browsers, were being used more and more to access these platforms. However, it took Disney four years after purchasing Club Penguin before releasing the first-ever Club Penguin app (which coincided with the launch of the first iPhone).

Additionally, it wasn’t cheap to maintain Club Penguin. 200 content moderators who regularly monitor the game’s chats were previously employed by the company.

This was a necessary sacrifice because Disney was unable to endorse a game that would subject kids to profanity and potentially dangerous characters.

Club Penguin had to continually find ways to innovate its graphics and game mechanics because it is designed for a specific demographic, namely kids between the ages of 6 and 14. Platforms like Roblox, which give users incentives to create games themselves, have done a much better job of staying relevant.

Disney simply lacks the internal resources to consistently produce top-notch games and patches, judging by its previous game releases.

Additionally, it is likely that Club Penguin was constructed using an out-of-date backend infrastructure, which kept costs consistently high.

Disney could not continue to run the company because operating expenses were high and interest (and consequently revenue) were declining.

When Will Club Penguin Return?

Due to all the reasons listed in the previous chapter, it is highly unlikely that the original Club Penguin, which was owned by Disney, will ever be released again.

The likelihood of Disney bothering to relaunch the game even seems lower given that the company is concentrating its efforts almost entirely on growing its streaming service Disney+.

Additionally, users wouldn’t hang around for very long in cartoon-based virtual worlds like Gaia Online or Small Worlds because interest in them has simply waned.

However, Disney continues to hold all of the game’s legal rights (as well as the subsequently launched Club Penguin Island).

Nevertheless, there are numerous imitations of the game out there right now. For instance, Club Penguin Rewritten is a nearly exact replica of the 2010 version of the game.

To keep its player base interested, Club Penguin Rewritten even produces original content, such as clothing or events. Unfortunately, any new version of Club Penguin is likely to only exist for a brief period of time given the closure of numerous copycat versions.

Conclusion

After an investigation, it was discovered that staff members were not moderating the Club Penguin Online game, which was filled with offensive material. According to an investigation, a London man connected to the website was detained by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of having images of child abuse. If you want to know about Club Penguin Deleted Account (2022), read our article on it, we have it covered for you.