LogFAQs > #979491346

Colonel_Lingus posted...

Curious if anyone would've voted Neopets, YDKJ, or Tokimeki Memorial... wish they allowed for expanded polls.

Neopets is a weird one. Its success paved the way for social media games like Farmville and Words with Friends and ultimately laid the groundwork for most mobile gaming and the whole concept of free-to-play live services (including design elements like rewards for checking in daily, time-gated progression, and social FOMO). It's certainly not the only precursor to that model (WoW's success is probably a larger driver of the live service model in premium games), so exactly how much can be attributed to Neopets is debatable, but that's a massive legacy whose presence is still felt very strongly in the modern industry, such that Neopets can definitely be said to have been a majorly influential game (we'll skip the semantic debate over whether or not calling it a "game" is accurate).

It's not, however, necessarily a *good* legacy. The live service gold rush has been a major driving force behind the trend of predatory monetization and design philosophies that focus more on engagement over fun, detracting considerably from the quality of games and causing no small amount of objective harm. To that end, I don't know if it's a legacy that necessarily needs to be honoured in a showcase of history's most influential games, particularly where Neopets was actually fun in its own right and therefore doesn't necessarily deserve to have such an unfortunate legacy attached to it.