Club Penguin – the Disney-owned, Flash-based MMO, which ran from 2005 to 2017 – was a formative experience for a generation of children. Stephen MacDonald, who was a senior manager at Disney from 2012 to 2015, says that Club Penguin had over 300 million registered users at its peak.
But the demise of Adobe Flash put paid to this penguin paradise, and a mobile-focused successor, Club Penguin Island, failed to take off – it shut down in December 2018, around a year and a half after its launch.
Now, Roblox has risen to become many children’s first taste of the online world. But MacDonald thinks that Roblox is no replacement for the safety-centred approach Club Penguin provided.
Stephen MacDonald | Image credit: Magic Potion Games
“What used to happen is a kid would go from a preschool product, like Peppa Pig, and then would go to Club Penguin to learn what it was to be safe online, learn all those tools, then they would graduate to Fortnite or something like that.”
Now, he says, “you’ve got kids going from Peppa Pig to Roblox, and unfortunately, that is not safe enough for that age of kids.
