User blog:Wonderweez/Why CP closed

As I am sure many of you are aware, Club Penguin is closing. Yet, I got curious as to why it was closing, so I decided to look at other games that have closed, as well as analytical information, and see why Club Penguin Island is taking over instead, whether we like it or not.

To those that know, this would be pretty much confirmation, but to those that don't know, here's why.

Reason One: User-base
Probably the most painfully obvious one: user-base of the actual game was falling rapidly. Disney does not release numbers, but you can infer from the numerous layoffs within the development team and the closure of German and Russian servers that the numbers were quickly dropping. In addition, it can be inferred based on the heavy emphasis on members-only content that the free user to paid user ratio was quickly becoming farther apart, leading more into the decline of revenue to make Club Penguin sustainable to keep the servers on.

Leading on from this...

Reason Two: Money
Money provides incentive for everything, and it is a commonly accepted rule that the smaller something gets from maximum peak, the less people are needed to keep it operational. This also applies to salaries, servers, etc. Since Disney does not rely on website based advertising on their client website, their source of income are memberships and merchandise. Attempts were made to launch several mobile apps to garner the attention of the mobile user to join in, but ultimately, this was a failure and were subsequently removed. As membership and merchandise sales decreased, the income decreased as well, leading to many lay offs within the company. Eventually, even this became unsustainable, forcing a closure. However, Disney, being lucrative, saw the potential in reaching a whole new audience.

So, they decided to...

Reason Three: Tap an ever-growing audience
The mobile market is rapidly expanding, and people with some form of tablet or mobile device are growing at an almost exponential rate as devices become cheaper and cheaper to get. With that, comes the new possibility of apps that can replace a full desktop experience. For example, Microsoft offers a Desktop and Mobile Version of their Word processor, but both do (almost) identical things. Yet, Microsoft can either make this app a payable one, or link it to their Office 365 suite, or make you buy things within the app. And thus, here is where Disney sets Club Penguin Island: give the user a basic avatar, but make it hard to buy within the game without having to spend an unreasonable amount of time or effort to get the items for free.

But hark, Disney has the solution! A simple payment of $1.99 or less (or more), and you can get this stuff AND emojis! You may think, "What a great deal!" yet also may realize the actual "return" on your purchase may not be exactly what you hope for it to be.

Similarly, Blizzard does this in Overwatch and their other games: make you pay for it, and allow you to work your way to get certain things for free (or in Overwatch's case, give all the characters for free), but if you want to avoid the hard work to get the customization options for the characters, you can buy the packs they come in, or use the money you accumulated from duplicates, but either way, you always give either time or money to the company.

But what if I want to play Club Penguin Island, but don't have a mobile device?
You can probably find an android emulator for windows or mac, but I can't guarantee that they will run, or run smoothly for that matter. I still have to test things, and I think that will become my little side project.

But yeah, that's the situation with this, and now you're informed. -  Wonderweez  ( Talk · Contribs ) 22:27, 29 March 2017 (UTC)