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Club Penguin is shutting down
- baldfat 10y agoThat took FOREVER. My son when he was 7 thought it was the greatest thing ever. I bought him one month and then I never allowed him to spend a dime on it. It was really not a quality product. There were better games and more social things then that site. He ended up addicted to Pokemon :)
- davidgerard 10y agoMy daughter too, she got heavily into the kids' MMOs for a while there (Moshi Monsters, Bin Weevils). (The business model for these things is: hook the kids with the free version, get them to nag their parents to buy membership.) Now she's into Pixelmon, a Pokemon-themed Minecraft mod, and various servers running it ;-D It's apparently in Technic Launcher, which will save you approximately forever downloading and setting up the precise version of the mod with the precise version of Minecraft.
- baldfat 10y agoMy youngest son loved the Marvel Hero Up Squad game at heroup.com. It closed this month.
- mavhc 10y agoModerated Lego forums are closing this month too, weird
- eriknstr 10y agoThe title "Club Penguin is shutting down" isn't perfect. They are launching something called "Club Penguin Island".
- james-skemp 10y agoExcept they are shutting down the current app and system. So the title seems to be accurate.
- sbuttgereit 10y agoIt's accurate, but probably not good. Most of the articles on HN that talk about a shut down are about the company going under. That doesn't seem to be the case here. Regardless of it's right or wrong to assume the content of a post based on its title, a much better title would make it clear the game is shutting down and not the company.
- ReverseCold 10y agoDisney's not going under anytime soon.
- sbuttgereit 10y agoGreat if you know that "Club Penguin" has any thing to do with Disney. Personally, I've never heard of it before (nor did I linger on the article long enough to find that out about any association with Disney). Given the start up community's penchant for... unorthodox... company names, for me it could have been an 'Uber' for dry cleaning for as much as I could glean from the title (Uber for dry cleaning... hey.... never mind). Again: completely accurate title, not as informative as it could be to anyone not already in the know. [edit for clarity of point]
- eriknstr 10y agoThanks, this is the way I should have phrased what I meant to say.
- cookiecaper 10y ago"Club Penguin" is not shutting down. It's moving to an updated, mobile-only platform. There is still a thing that bears the Club Penguin name and theme, run by the people who run Club Penguin, onto which, presumably, the majority of Club Penguin's current userbase will migrate. From my reading, some types of memberships will even carry over onto the new platform. This is a major release that drops support for desktop platforms. So it's certainly a substantial change, but it's not fair to call it a shutdown. If anything, the market for this type of game is only growing as mobile devices become a ubiquitous part of first-world childhoods. It would make no sense for a successful platform like Club Penguin to abandon that market, especially considering the vertical integration opportunities it provides to its parent company.
- dbalan 10y agoFor people who is wondering what it is.. "Club Penguin is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) involving a virtual world containing a range of online games and activities," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Penguin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Penguin
- falcolas 10y agoMore specifically, it's an MMO aimed at children. With restricted chat and simplistic gameplay, it was very popular with the under 14 crowd.
- strgrd 10y agoIt was also a known gateway for terrorists, and terrorist recruiting cells. The relative obscurity of the game and the assumed anonymity made it a breeding ground for black market crimes.
- NTripleOne 10y agoThat sounds like the kind of BS 4chan would try to get people to believe.
- Cthulhu_ 10y agoClub Penguin was a frequent target for 4chan and reddit trolls, similar to Habbo Hotel (see: the Pool's Closed meme and /r/bannedfromclubpenguin on reddit)
- Jonnax 10y agoWasn't that a joke in the film Four Lions?
- tptacek 10y ago(a) Yes and (b) solid movie.
- Neliquat 10y agoPools closed forever.
- anonnyj 10y agoNo more CP...
- dickbasedregex 10y agoThat was Habbo Hotel. Was that shenanigan used at CP too?
- hatsunearu 10y agoNot AFAIK, just a reference it seems.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoNot even possible. CP didn't allow for player collision, IIRC.
- jamesmp98 10y agoDamn no more trolling
- adtac 10y agoYou were trolling 10 year olds? Really?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bencollier49 10y agoMy daughter used to love Club Penguin. This story gave me a bit of a nostalgia hit. Especially the image of the final party town centre with the big two-penguin picture.
- mgcross 10y agoMy son used to love CP, played off and on until I introduced him to Garry's Mod.
- Angostura 10y agoWhat does your son do with GM? Seriously interested.
- nerflad 10y agoIn my experience kids love Garry's Mod if they have the patience to learn it. My brother played the heck out of it when he was 13. (To answer your question, he was playing custom game modes and would sometimes use the character poser/scene creation tools). It's great for technically inclined kids who love sandboxes and are bored with Minecraft.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoIf he was anything like me, mess about, and occaisionally build something simple.
- mgcross 10y agoHe's been playing for 5 years now, so he's a mod on a few servers. He started out building simple things, then progressed to wiremod within a couple of weeks. It wasn't long before I couldn't keep up with him when I tried to check out what he was building. He used to build cars/vehicles (mostly from scratch, not using car models) and add them to the workshop, think he has a couple dozen in there. Now he mostly camps on servers and chats with friends (online friends), warns and kicks players when he gets reports, that sort of thing.
- rocky1138 10y agoHow do you handle the dreadful behaviour of people on GM multiplayer? I'm 33, so it doesn't affect me at all (Counter Strike veteran here) but I showed my 8-year-old nephew and was like ... uhh maybe we'll play a different game, then.
- 10y ago
- cyberferret 10y agoAh, I remember my older son being quite addicted to CP back in the day. It seemed to be a cool platform, really easy for kids to use and interact with their friends. I think I even paid for a couple of annual subscriptions. But I think I will be sadder to see it go than my son would, purely from a nostalgia standpoint and for the sake of remembering those days of innocence...
- ourmandave 10y agoMy daughter too, back in the day. I used to play the games so she'd have coins to spend. I got quite good at making pizzas.
- jasonkostempski 10y agoMy kid was never into CP but I think just about everything he is into will eventually disappear just like this. Anything that requires an account to function is doomed to fade from existence.
- khedoros1 10y agoI've been thinking about this for a few years. It's one reason that I don't care for online gaming; it's always in the back of my mind that the thing will disappear someday. That's one thing that draws me into retro games; they tend not to have external requirements like internet services, update patches, and so on.
- cschmidt 10y agoMy son played a lot of Club Penguin when he was younger. Now my daughter is playing Animal Jam instead.
- jasikpark 10y agoNooo!!!! My childhood!!!!!
- personjerry 10y agoWhy is this a link to puffl.es instead of the Club Penguin site directly?
- Delcorum 10y agopuffle is one of their trademarked applications they made that was a spin-off of the Club Penquin IP. I am pretty sure that they closed down those projects and most likely just made the URL just link back to the Parent/Main site.
- hatsunearu 10y agoAnd they are launching a successor, Club Penguin Island which is apparently just the same thing but better, so there's that.
- Angostura 10y agoOh god, I'm going to have to break this to my daughters this evening.
- josefresco 10y agoSame here - although my daughter doesn't play consistently. Thankfully I've got her jazzed about TF2 now that she's a bit older and has gotten good with the WADS/FPS controls. I think any parent with a child who's an active CP player is thinking two things: "Oh man, I got to break it to my kid" and "Great! Now they'll stop nagging me for a paid subscription"
- mamadrood 10y agoThey are launching a sequel called CP Island. So don't rejoice too soon.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoFrom the sounds of this thread Club Penguin need to get right on damage limitation and make sure this is reported in media as "Club Penguin upgrading to Club Penguin Island" or somesuch. Presumably they want to move their current user-base rather than kill it off and start again. Sounds like they're having a PR disaster if this thread is representative.
- lmm 10y ago> Thankfully I've got her jazzed about TF2 now that she's a bit older and has gotten good with the WADS/FPS controls. You probably already know, but I'd highly recommend Overwatch in that kind of niche. Similar co-operative FPS gameplay with a more vibrant/interesting backstory/world and characters, and very polished. It's got me doing more gaming than I have for perhaps a decade (heck, it's even good enough to be worth putting up with a non-Steam platform).
- josefresco 10y agoThanks for the tip - I think the part she likes the best is we get to play together/co-op
- amyjess 10y agoAll I ever knew about Club Penguin was that for a while it was popular for people to post dirty stuff there to get banned and then submit a screenshot of the ban to Reddit. [0] [0] https://reddit.com/r/bannedfromclubpenguin https://reddit.com/r/bannedfromclubpenguin
- Endy 10y agoAww. Too bad.
- RangerScience 10y agoOh man! My very first job, I worked for the studio that made the Club Penguin DS game. Cut my teeth on assembly (for a profiler) and a FLC video decoder (void * cast to structs, anyone?). Good times! Also, my immediate boss / mentor was the spouse of EA Spouse. Dude was (and almost certainly still is) a ridiculously amazing engineer.
- rocky1138 10y agoWrite a book! I'll buy it.
- RangerScience 10y agoNot nearly enough material. Probably enough for a good blog post. Lan (the guy) probably has enough material, but I only worked with him for a few months. I think the best quote came from a mutual friend (paraphrased, because decade ago) "When I first met Lan, I made a resolution: I'd be as good as he was in a year. Then I got to know him, and realized: I could be as good as Lan was; he got better faster than I could catch up."
- papaver 10y agooh ea spouse... was at tiburon when that hit the fan... what a time to be at ea... mess from all directions...
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI was a kid in the early 2000s, so my perspective is somewhat different to many here. I was a CP member, and played fairly religiously for a few years. It was one of the first things I got an account for on the internet. Farewell CP. We will... Not exactly miss you, but, you know.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoIs the death of Flash causing problems for them? Unless something I'm unaware of happened, the entire client is still built in it. I would guess it was their reliance on Flash which motivated writing a new mobile version.
- cookiecaper 10y agoYeah, I'm sure that played a significant role. It's getting harder and harder to run Flash these days. My understanding is that some browsers require a fairly complex, multi-window process to add a domain to the Flash whitelist, and that this is only going to get worse, culminating in Flash's complete removal over the next 1-2 years. They likely decided that moving to mobile-only and abandoning the desktop market was better than trying to write a WebGL/HTML5 compliant client.
- ashark 10y agoIs there a good way to preserve and run flash content as we move into this brave new flash-free world, with good long-term prospects? At least the stuff that doesn't require a server component? Lots of cool stuff from the mid-period Web was flash. All of Homestarrunner, obviously. Thousands of games. JibJab was (is?) big, and IIRC their early stuff was Flash. Various animated shorts of varying character and quality (remember when Stickperson Fight animations were big? The best were usually in Flash)
- khedoros1 10y agoI haven't tried the Gnash player in a while (years), but when I did try, it was pretty promising for playing swf files that were just animations. A lot of them have also ended up as rendered video on places like Youtube.