Neopets Gambling Controversy

Neopoet writes "Players of the online virtual pet game Neopets (claims 70 million pet owners worldwide) have gone nuts against an Australian current affairs show called Today Tonight after the show ran segments railing against the Neopets for introducing children to gambling. Click below to read on. It started when McDonalds Australia included a Neopets plush toy with every kids' Happy Meal in Australia, directing kids to the Neopets website.

To "feed" their pets, Neopets players have to win points in a variety of mini-games, including versions of poker and blackjack. Australia has a high rate of gambling problems with poker machines ("pokies"), so when a mother discovered her nine-year-old playing online poker to feed his virtual pet, she approached Today Tonight claiming McDonalds was setting her son up for a life of gambling addiction.

TT aired the story Parents not McHappy over pokie toy and the Neopets message boards went nuts. Meanwhile McDonalds heavied Neopets into banning Australians from the gambling games. Today Tonight must have received a lot of hate mail because the next night came Neopet players fight McDonalds ban, featuring interviews with adult Neopets addicts. But this only increased the outrage on the Neopets boards - they're now trying to squash rumors of McDonalds withdrawing sponsorship altogether, and Neopets shutting down."

Comments

There is nothing wrong with Neopets.

[PotatoHead]

I got hooked on this for a while, playing with my daughters. We had a neopoint contest and it was good fun.

That site is pretty educational as far as I am concerned. Sure there is gambling, but there are plenty of other things too.

You can play games of skill to get your points and avoid the gambling ones.

The educational part for my family came after I won the Neopoint contest. (It was first to get 250,000) My kids lost because they did not understand how the whole Neopia thing worked.

Things we talked about:

Investments: How the bank was different from the stock market. What is compound interest and how does it benefit you. Keeping your money liquid vs tied up in investments and how that affects your ability to build wealth.

Marketing, buying and selling: Setting up a shop. How to make your shop stand out, what are people buying, how to take advantage of trends in the marketplace. Ripping people off and getting ripped off.

Gambling: Scratch cards, games of chance, how investments are similar to gambling and how they are different.

As far as I am concerned, Neopets is one of the very best sites on the net for parents to talk to their kids about money matters.

Highly Recommended, IMHO.

NeoPets is weird...

[davidu]

They sent my site, EveryDNS a bunch of threatening letters to take down a site that discussed techniques for winning these point games.

The weirdest part is that these points have no real monetary value and yet I was being threatened with a lawsuit for providing DNS to another site that had information about their games.

It's always upsetting when someone tries to pick on the little guys like me but it's even more annoying when they have NO CLAIM!

I'm not even going to get into the fact that I wasn't the sites ISP or network provider. I was so far removed and acting only as a part of the infrastructure and yet because I wasn't a big company, they picked on me. Can't blame them for being smart I guess...

-davidu

Re:NeoPets is weird...

[davidu]

We get these all the time. We treat each case differently. Often times I am able to tell the legal firm who contacts us that we aren't the ISP and that we have no control over the website. Surprisingly, that's often enough.

In this case, after talking with their lawyer on the phone and knowing him to be serious about making my life suck we contacted the site owner and gave them enough time to move their site without having downtime.

In other cases we've talked with the EFF, this however, was not the sort of case that would be worth the EFFs efforts. When we got the Diebold Cease and Desist, it was a matter the EFF decided to pursue (and recently 'won').

-david

Typical of Today Tonight

[ttys00]

That "current affairs" show is utter crap. They sensationalise all sorts of mundane things just to get viewers to watch. Anything for ratings. There are better alternatives on SBS (another channel), but hey, no one watches anything other than channels 7,9, and 10.

Disclaimer: I'm an Aussie and disgusted with the crappy tv we have to put up with.

Re:Dreidel

[Anonymous Coward]

Your pets NEVER die; they stay hungry.

They are NEVER taken from you.

If you don't log in for a year or so, the account and your pets are removed from the system. Neopets is a free-standing society and economy. You, sir, have never played.