Here's what GoPets has Become

sad and mad at the same time. i cant help but have ill feelings towards Erik and Zynga. i hope one or both, sink eventually. i dont want to feel bitter but darn it, i give in.
Hey, better for Zynga to buy and retire competition, right?
like most money-hungry scum, they use others as mere stepping stones from what ive been reading. wow, i it realy makes me want to spend money on their crappy games

im not getting into an online game like i did with gopets again. too painful when the rug gets yanked out from under you.

im sorry i sound negative

That's an outsiders take on what happened. I've seen a lot of these stories with a lot of mistakes and misinformation. To give you an idea, read this article and note the erroneous assumptions - http://ow.ly/BD1f

As one of the comments to the article link I posted says, Zynga is more into talent acquisition than app acquisition. I've been told from the last chat that Erik confirmed Zynga bought GoPets only because they wanted this team to work on their products, not because they cared about owning GoPets.

Petville was already planned. The article you posted says Erik went to work at Zynga right after GoPets was purchased--so much of the development for Petville must have been done before he worked there. You don't design and build a whole game in a month. It really had nothing to do with the GoPets aquisition. Erik has also mentioned his team is working on other games, like Farmville.

If Zynga's *sure* they won't ever do anything with GoPets, why would they have asked MrFitz to repost the thread for the opinions of GoPets users? See his post here - https://gopets.forumotion.net/discussion-f5/let-zynga-know-t143.htm

And also Erik said he might buy GoPets back from Zynga at some point. He said he has saved all the data and code.

So I wouldn't put a final nail in GoPets coffin yet. I admit it's unlikely anything will come of it, but the rights are out there, the code is out there, and you never know what the future might bring. Personally, I'd like to see someone write a game similar to the early version of GoPets, but without the bugs, and I wouldn't mind recreating my pets in the new game if that was the case.

So I don't quite know what "putting to sleep" means...
It can't just mean the end all of GoPets forever, right?
It seems so unlikely to me that they would do that... Let's all keep posting in their forums to bring the game back - cause I still really miss it.
And I'm with Snowdrift; there's no other game that I would ever spend the time - and certainly not the money -on, like I did with GoPets.
It just seems too foolish to kill the game forever. It's the only one of its kind out there - and it's the only one that really caters to the steadily growing demographic of female players.
They have to bring it back!

Keep in mind the article was written with no input from Zynga (as noted at the end of the article). I'm sure they rather keep it open ended, no need to rush to any kind of decision.

Wow, Asynjur, when I read what you said about maybe bringing back a game like GoPets used to be, I couldn't believe how happy my heart got at the idea. My heart, in ways, is like a perpetually optimistic, naive child, that just doesn't know how not to hope. Would I ever love it if they brought back the sweet GoPets and Erik had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. LOL Has anyone posted or written to Zynga that Erik destroyed GoPets? I really think they should know that. And why do all the articles keep saying that Erik had a staff of 55 or whatever before Zynga bought GoPets??? I still remember his post where he said, "Me and my wife are spending our own money and staying up for weeks on end in order to get all the work done to keep go pets open... Aren't we heroic and won't this impress someone???" He had NO staff for months, and finally got a few people to volunteer or work some on GoPets before Zynga bought them.

That "staff of 55" was before the company went under over a year and a half ago. (end of spring, '08). Of course they use that 55 number to make it look like the company was big. Just like some games say "we have 1 million users". Yeah 1 million signed up but how many actually are active players? Everyone likes to boost their numbers to make themselves look big. So yeah that 55 hasn't been true for a long long time.

I too would love to see a new version of a similar game come out. I did try to do the petville game, but it was so slow and laggy and I got a bug right off. The pets are not cute. After I got that bug and it lagged even more (waiting a couple of minutes for the images to load) I gave up. Very unattractive.

omc this is a disgrace and an absolute mockery! im appalled!

Ick, the screenshot for PetVille looks hideous.

I can't beleve it's gone forever. Even if gopets itself never comes back, we still have this community here and most of us could rebuild the pets using gopets DS.

darkpaw wrote:I can't beleve it's gone forever. Even if gopets itself never comes back, we still have this community here and most of us could rebuild the pets using gopets DS.

rock on darkpaw! So true. Gopets lives on!