The website was a gathering place, and although each user was anonymous, they were all united in their love of Club Penguin. Finally, the day of its death was announced, and the game ended with one final mass-hurrah as users waved their goodbyes on each digital chat room. That became a problem once the original developers left, one by one – Disney had total control.ĭisney soon wanted more out of the game than it could provide, and once the userbase started declining, they began siphoning resources away: furloughed workers, reducing resources, and an overall gutting of the game so that revenue could be directed elsewhere. Unlike many other properties, it was entirely funded by Disney. When Disney bought it back in 2007, it seemed like a match made in heaven – a big company funding a website that was exactly their target audience, what could go wrong?įor a while, things were great! The website peaked at about 200 million registered accounts, with about 30 million active at the time. Spinoffs are where Club Penguin went wrong, and it started with the official spin-off post-shutdown.Ĭlub Penguin took a lot of resources, but it brought a lot of joy. The site itself was fundamentally a money-sucker. Solving the issue of ‘low revenue’ would have rendered the website less child-friendly, thus completely defeating the purpose. Salvage can still happen – TikTok is a lot like Musically, which was a lot like Vine – but it takes a lot of innovation and analytical work to figure out how to successfully salvage a failed model instead of just repeating the mistakes made by the first group.Ĭlub Penguin’s issues could have been solved – but the founders (and then later, Disney) simply decided not to solve them for the sake of the website’s community.

If it worked as-is, it wouldn’t be doing that. It shows a lack of understanding for why the original site is shutting down or cutting features. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: spinoff websites are almost always a bad idea. The website was fantastic! Unfortunately, it didn’t earn much revenue by itself, and it ultimately shut down just a few years ago in Disney’s hands. Club Penguin started when the founders realized how few internet safe-spaces there were for children: spaces with no ads, no adult content, and no suspicious cookie tracking were basically non-existent.Thus, they set out to make a site that could fill that void. It was well built, well moderated, and didn’t feature ads at all due to its child-friendly nature. Beloved by many, hated by few, Club Penguin was a gem of the 2000’s era of internet.

Club penguin island sucks