Habbo Moves On Up

The next project? Hotelli Kulta Kala, which translates to "Hotel Goldfish". Haro remembered, "The retro pixel look was done at this time. It's actually served us pretty well. It looked as old seven years ago as it does now. If you think about 3D games from seven years ago they look pretty terrible. And the kids who play this game don't even know what the word 'retro' means. It's just another look to them." 

When the project began, there wasn't so much a business plan or even an overarching design philosophy. "We wanted to give some kind of tools for people to do their own stuff. [There was] no thinking about business models at this point. We just wanted something to happen. [We expected to last] 3-5 months, if we're lucky." Of course, Hotel Goldfish was designed to generate profits from the get-go (or it wouldn't be around today as Habbo Hotel, no doubt.) "The business model here was virtual furniture sales using premium SMS. It took about five minutes for us to set up the actual sales part because it had already been established."

Immediately, there was a scamming problem with the users. The naming convention for furniture allowed for a trick where a user with a name like "100x" could convince other users that he was trading 100 units of furniture. In light of this, Sulka's advice is, "When looking at your product and figuring out how people play it... one in a million might figure [an exploit] out, but we have 80 million people visiting the site. Always expect your users will figure it out."

Shortly, it was time to take Hotel Goldfish global. And the name had to be changed, habbohotel coins to Habbo Hotel. "We retroactively branded the finnish hotel -- the users hated it, obviously." Given that Finland is the home of Nokia, it's little surprise to hear that the population had cell phones in 2000. But at the UK launch (the second territory to get Habbo) kids in that country didn't have phones. "We changed from selling virtual furniture to selling virtual currency. This is obviously a massive change for how we did things. We didn't realize at the time back then how big a change this was. We through it was just a workaround to get the furniture into the hands of the kids." These days, Habbo accepts "100 ways" to pay.