In June 2008, Disney plans to open an Australian office in August of that year. In April 2008, Club Penguin opened its first international office in the UK for local support. Players had a "clone" of their penguin made to test these new servers for bugs and glitches. This project allowed players to be part of the testing of new servers put into use in Club Penguin on April 14, 2008. On March 11, 2008, Club Penguin released the Club Penguin Improvement Project (CPIP). In making the sale, Merrifield has stated that their main focus during negotiations was philosophical, and that the intent was to provide themselves with the needed infrastructure in order to continue to grow. In addition, the owners were promised bonuses of up to $350 million if they were able to meet growth targets by 2009. Although the owners had turned down lucrative advertising offers and venture capital investments in the past, in August 2007 they agreed to sell both Club Penguin and the parent company for the sum of $350 million. At the point when it was purchased by Disney, Club Penguin had 12 million accounts, of which 700,000 were paid subscribers, and were generating $40 million in annual revenue. By the time Club Penguin was two years old, it had reached 3.9 million users. After two years of testing and development, the first version of Club Penguin went live on October 24, 2005.Ĭlub Penguin started with 15,000 users, and by March that number had reached 1.4 million-a figure which almost doubled by September, when it hit 2.6 million. Thus, when Priebe, Merrifield, and Krysko decided to go ahead with Club Penguin in 2003, they had Penguin Chat on which to base part of the design process. Although Experimental Penguins went off line in 2001, it was used as the inspiration for Penguin Chat, which was released shortly after Experimental Penguins' removal. As part of Rocketsnail Games, Priebe released Experimental Penguins in 2000, which featured gameplay similar to that which was incorporated into Club Penguin. Prior to starting work on Club Penguin, Lance Priebe had been developing Flash web-based games in his spare time. Merrifield and Priebe approached their employer, David Krysko, with the idea of creating a spinoff company to develop the new product. As Merrifield later described the situation, they decided to build Club Penguin when they were unsuccessful in finding "something that had some social components but was safe, and not just marketed as safe" for their own children. Lance Priebe and Lane Merrifield, employees at New Horizon Productions (which became New Horizon Interactive in 2005) in Kelowna, British Columbia, saw a need for "social networking for kids". On January 30, 2017, Club Penguin announced that the game will be discontinued/shutdown on March 29, 2017, to pave way for its successor Club Penguin Island. The game has been criticized for teaching consumerism and allowing players to cheat. Thus, a major focus of the developers has been on child safety, with a number of features introduced to the game to facilitate this - including offering an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode, whereby users could select their comments from a menu Wordfilter filtering that prevented swearing and the revelation of personal information and moderators (along with veteran players) who patrolled the game. ] The success of Club Penguin led to New Horizon being purchased by The Walt Disney Company on Augfor the sum of 350 million dollars, with an additional 350 million dollars in bonuses if specific targets were met by 2009.
#Club penguin island forever free
While free memberships were available, revenue was predominantly raised through paid memberships which allowed players to access a range of additional features, such as the ability to purchase virtual clothing, furniture and in-game pets called "puffles" for their penguins through the use of in-game currency. After beta-testing, Club Penguin was made available to the general public on Octo] and has since expanded into a large online community-growing to the extent that by late 2007, it was claimed that Club Penguin had over 12 million user accounts. Players used cartoon penguin- avatars and played in a winter-set virtual world. Massively multiplayer online game External links Official websiteĬlub Penguin was a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) involving a Virtual World containing a range of online games and activities, developed by Disney Canada Inc.