Habbo and Social Culture

Talking about Habbo Hotel, I was interested when you said earlier today that you were seeing trends develop in terms of like style and culture across different servers. Can you talk a little about what was happening there?

Sulka Haro: Sure. Obviously, the servers we set up, they're partially divided by the markets, some partially by language.

By markets, you mean regions, right?

SH: Yeah, regional. So there's one hotel for the French and one for the Germans, which obviously is like... it’s kind of like language areas, as well, but for example, for the Spanish speaking people, we only have one hotel where a lot of Latin America and Spain come in. As far as I know, habbohotel coins some people from North America are in there as well. And obviously, people carry their own culture, like the one they have in the real world, into the hotel.

So, that changes the way people behave in that particular instance of our shard. But also, there are aspects of culture that people create. For example, there's the racing culture. So, the way you're supposed to dress is different for each one of the shards in Habbo, even though for an outsider, it looks like the dressing is very similar obviously, because the clothing looks similar in all the hotels.

But the established players pretty much immediately recognize new players just by how they dress. So something that might look like a really proper fine clothing combination for somebody who doesn't know the dressing culture in that particular instance might be something that the established player thinks is very silly.