Club Penguin Shutting Down on March 29, 2017

Disney announced today that the current desktop and mobile version of Club Penguin will be shutting down on March 29, 2017. Club Penguin originally launched back in October, 2005 and ran for a bit over 11 years. Disney originally purchased Club Penguin for $350M in cash back in 2007 in a move to bolster their MMO presence. The game grew to over 200 million registered users by 2013, but it looks like it has been in decline since then. Despite the game's impending closure, Disney isn't completely abandoning the Club Penguin franchise. A new platform called "Club Penguin Island" is set to launch sometime in March, 2017. Pre-registration for this new service has already opened, but there aren't too many details available about it just yet. All we know is that it'll be mobile centric.

Club Penguin was an MMO aimed at kids ages 6-14 where players control penguin avatars as they explore a winter-set virtual world. I personally only played it briefly just to see what it was (as I was a Neopets player back in the day), but it's still sad to see it go, especially since Club Penguin introduced MMOs to millions of kids.