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Habbo Hotel: Rooms
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Habbo, formerly Habbo Hotel, is a social networking website owned and operated by Sulake Corporation. Aimed at teenagers, Habbo features chat rooms rendered by isometric projection in the form of virtual hotel rooms. User pages on the website are linked to these rooms and allow users to share content and create groups with discussion forums. Each user, called a Habbo, has a customizable avatar to represent him or herself. The service gains revenue from credits bought with real-life currency. Credits are used to buy products such as virtual furniture for the virtual hotel rooms and stickers for user pages.
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Popular mostly outside of the U.S., Habbo Hotel is a mostly free online virtual world which earned $30 million in revenue in 2006. The site is targeted towards a younger demographic ranging from 13 to 18 year olds (90% of users fall in this range). It is free to register and walk around the hotel, yet users can pay extra for more functionality, club membership and furnishings for their hotel room. Users join on to chat, play games, go virtual swimming and do anything else one might do in a real hotel. Since the hotel is mostly populated by youths, all chats are filtered and all rooms monitored. Users cannot give email address or phone numbers to others neither can they use offensive language or sexist terms.
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On July 26, 2006, at 7:00 EST, Habbo Hotel was going to show an exclusive advanced screen of Ultimate Avengers 2 in the Theaterdome. Hours in advance, /b/tards flooded the Theaterdome, blocking off the stage and taking all the seats in an effort to fill up the room in advance, so legit Habbo users could not watch the screen. At around 4pm, EST, the Habbo staff closed down the room and made it so only Habbo Club Members could join the room... limiting it to the few Habbo users who actually pay for that. Habbo users actually attempted to spam /b/ with relatively pathetic insults. Their posts either were driven to the bottom pages through the insane speed of /b/, or ridiculed with ease by /b/tards.
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Habbo Hotel's business model relies partly on microtransactions (buying new furniture for your room, new clothes, etc.). Microtransactions, while great in concept, are tough to get right, though. Haro talked about how Habbo Hotel makes this business model function, and warned about the dangers of selling things which unbalance a game.
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Habbo Hotel is a virtual hangout for kids. This cyberworld provides a fully immersive playsphere for young ones to gad about playing games, chatting, and decking out their hotel rooms. While the site is free to join, Habbo members can buy Habbo coins to purchase furniture (check out the catalogue for the latest styles), adopt pets (there aren’t any hamsters, but you can buy yourself a cuddly crocodile), and join posh clubs. Get your Habbo moola from Target or use your dad’s credit card to buy coins directly from the site. As Habbo is geared for young minds, chats and are filtered and rooms are scrutinized; despite its being a hotel, there are certain things you simply cannot do. Members are barred from giving out email addresses and phone numbers.
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Habbo Hotel is a richly colorful, multi-dimensional virtual meeting place and game environment for teens. Users join by creating a fully-customized online character called a Habbo. From there, they can explore many public hang outs, play a variety of games, connect with friends, decorate their own hotel rooms, and have fun through creativity and self expression. Since its launch in 2000 by Sulake, an interactive entertainment company that specializes in developing, publishing and distributing multiplayer online communities and games, Habbo Hotel sites have been introduced in 16 countries, with more than 41 million Habbo characters created and more than 5.4 million unique users each month. The highly-trafficked U.S site, www.habbohotel.com, is visited by over 1.5 million unique users per month who spend on average more than three hours a week on the site (Nielsen Net Ratings).
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