Coming Soon: AJ for older kids?!

Hey Jammers! Remember that post I made last weekend where I was wondering what the heck is going on at AJHQ? Well, it turns out that on the same exact day I published that post, another post was made on Animal Jam Archives that may just answer this question... among many others that we have had over the years!

So apparently in January, the podcast Kidtech interviewed Clark Stacey where he revealed some potentially big info about things that are soon to come on AJ.

I have no idea how anyone at AJ Archives could find this podcast– I'm always going deep to find news about Animal Jam and I've never once seen this.

There's already a summary of some parts of the interview in the link above, but as I write this I'm listening to the podcast to summarize the interesting stuff for you guys, and at 9 minutes in here's the first new thing:

- The partnership with Nat Geo was to help AJ compete for attention with bigger kids games like Club Penguin. 

This makes sense! It's hard to gain publicity as a small kids game when you're overshadowed by giants like Disney. 

It's common sense, but it's good that this was mentioned because it implies that the break-off between Nat Geo and AJ may have just been because AJ didn't need them for publicity anymore.

Additionally:

- The partnership with Nat Geo was expensive, and even though they have a huge library of animal video and photography, licensing issues made it hard to use. Much of the educational material on AJ was collected by AJ itself!

It's starting to make more sense why AJ split with Nat Geo.

Also,

- Animal Jam was close to having partnered with Animal Planet, but eventually ended up with Nat Geo instead. 

Just thought that was interesting. 

And another fun fact:

- 20,000 pieces of artwork are sent in every day through the Masterpiece system and each is checked by a real person twice. Wow

The main idea, however, comes around the end of this 45-minute podcast:

Wildworks has been working on... Animal Jam for younger kids, and Animal Jam for older kids.

(Ok, for the record, neither of the above screenshots are "leaks" of the potential new games– the one above is an example of early AJ animal designs from the Animal Jam Archives, and the one below is a screenshot from the game Lif. They were just the first things that popped into my head when I heard about this lol)

According to Clark Stacey, there has been a lot of feedback from Jammers saying "I'm a junior or senior in high school. I've been playing AJ for 5 or 6 years but it feels weird to still be playing at this age. You guys should do something like Animal Jam but for older kids with less restrictions."

I can relate to the quote above except that I don't feel weird about playing AJ anymore lol– it's something that makes me happy, so I don't really care if I'm not exactly the target demographic.

But anyway, Clark Stacey goes onto confirm that Wildworks is in the process of developing these two new games and that they should be announced soon publicly. 

He described the one for younger kids as a "bridge into Animal Jam" and the one for older kids as "what happens after Animal Jam". They probably won't be exactly like Animal Jam, but I wonder if the one for older kids might use graphics similar to beta testing given how older Jammers might be nostalgic for that. 

Personally, I think the 'Animal Jam for older kids' is a nice idea (I'd probably play both that and normal AJ), but the 'Animal Jam for kids below 8' seems a bit much. If kids grow up fixed to a computer screen while they are very young... it's just not good, no matter how cool the game is. 

I really hope that the kind of uneventful updates AJ has been having don't continue even after these upcoming games are announced, but regardless, it seems from the interview that Animal Jam is a labor of love, for the most part.

Thanks for reading, and see you in Jamaa! :)