Webkinz is a product of Ganz, which is a Canadian company reputed for producing luxurious stuffed animals and various types of collectibles. Out of all its products, the webkinz have been the best selling of all and the company is recognised for being the official producers of Webkinz. It has created a worldwide buzz and every kid has been driving their parents crazy to buy their access to the Webkinz World.
These Webkinz are stuffed animal toys, better known as plush toys, which the company launched in 2005. Although the toys are quite similar to the other soft toys of its kind, they have an additional ‘unique code’ stuck to their labels that provides them the key to enter the “Webkinz World” website where they can “adopt” a computer generated version of their pet to interact with them virtually. Webkinz also has a miniature version of the stuffed animals, which they have named Lil’ Kinz. Webkinz has been immensely admired amongst children and Ganz has claimed that they have sold over 2 million pieces to the retailers and about a million people has registered with Webkinz Website.
Webkinz offers a unique gameplay in which the user is given the option to adopt their Webkinz pet. It comes with very elementary items like a room, one sort of food item, a couple of furniture. The currency in the world of webkinz is known as kinzcash and an initial amount of 2000 kinzcash is provided to the gamer for initial food and housing costs.
Individual pets have their own levels of health, hunger or happiness and these features are time dependent. That means with increased time of game play, they decrease. These ‘states’ can be controlled by playing, feeding or simply by bathing their pets. If these virtual pets cannot be taken care of, the pets tend to get sick and then medication has to be bought with the virtual cash.
The game only features online game play that can be played without any charge for the first one year. To continue playing from the second year and onwards you must buy another toy. After the first year expires, an addition 14-day grace period is provided during which the users can still log in to their accounts. After the 14-day grace period, the account is deactivated. If the account is not renewed within the next 90 days, the account will be permanently deleted and all the saved data will be wiped out. In that case, you have will have to buy another animal to get a completely new account.