GameSetMotion: Designing Habbo On $10 Per Card?
[This mini-feature, written by Game Developer's publisher Simon Carless, takes a personal look at navigating and spending money in Sulake Labs' Habbo Hotel, and was originally published on the CMP Game Group's alternative weblog Game Set Watch.]
So, it turns out that online worlds may be pretty important to the future of the video game industry - we've been asking about just that on Gamasutra recently, with our 'Question Of The Week' on Habbo Hotel and World Of Warcraft, and of course, we have the entire Worlds In Motion weblog on this subject.
But browsing round major U.S. retailer Target a couple of weeks back, we spotted prepaid cards for Habbo Hotel, and thought - what would it be like if we had to spend $10 on setting ourselves up in Sulake Labs' (largely kids/teen-centric) Web browser-based online world? What do you get for your money? This, GSW friends, is what happened:
Some conclusions, then: Leigh Alexander's profile of Habbo on WorldsInMotion.biz covers all the basics and more, to be honest. Now, the age of users in Habbo is skewed very young indeed compared to GSW readers (Sulka Haro's Austin GDC keynote has lots more great info on demographics.)
But from my experience, even as a 30-something male gamer in Habbo, doing interior decoration for one's own virtual chat room is extremely good fun, even when all the objects cost real money. (You don't have to decorate your own room, incidentally - you can just hang out in the public spaces or in other people's rooms.)
So sure, this part of Habbo's online environment is similar to The Sims and/or Animal Crossing room decoration with microtransactions, and as a business model for online games, it works. Looking forward to seeing more games using it - and we'll be trying Nexon's $10 virtual item card next, on games like MapleStory and Kart Rider.
Comments
awesome. can't wait to see more explorations like this
Posted by: glitch | October 8, 2007 3:32 PM
i went onto habbo hotelmario was better u get free coins so i hate habbo so much and i am going to tele people to stop going on it
Posted by: kelvin | October 29, 2007 3:37 PM
can you give me coins and e mail the code
Posted by: morgan | April 23, 2008 3:17 PM