You are here: The online virtual social world for teens sees about 11.5 million uniques per month, Haro adds. So the numbers seem to suggest Habbo is thriving, Habbo Hotel and although its financials aren't published, "there's probably good news coming up," Haro says.
Haro was at the Worlds in Motion Summit at GDC 2009 to discuss applying game mechanics within the context of a social game, an effort he described as "pretty successful" thus far.
Since an online product is persistent, he dubbed his presentation more of a "mid-mortem" than a post-mortem, as it was originally billed.
As a social virtual world, Habbo's mechancs are rooted in user-generated content, habbohotel coins and relies on providing an open-ended experience that the users can design.
"Given that we're operating in 33 markets and the youth culture is hugely different... we're still relevant to the teens in each one of our markets because the teens bring their own culture and the stuff they love into the world," Haro explained.
Habbo is "most definitely not a game," said Haro. "Looking at how people in the industry are looking at social virtual worlds, there's a very strong polarization between the two." Haro noted that people see open-ended social worlds as opposite to games. "I think that's complete bull," he said.
"But they actually support each other very nicely and could support each other much more," Haro suggested, noting that social worlds could benefit from game mechanics and games could benefit from more user-generated social content.
"When you go to WoW and try to do a pick-up group, most of the time the experience just sucks," said Haro, as an example. "So, we can really improve things going into the future."
In that vein, Habbo has been trying to boost the game mechanics within its world while still maintaining its socially-oriented open-endedness. There's a key reason behind the decision: in the highly competitive free-to-play social world space, user retention is key."
And social value erodes quickly," Haro said, noting the importance of user retention in the highly-competitive free-to-play social world space.
"If you leave Habbo for a couple months and come back, if you want to do well, you'll need to spend a lot of energy building a profile again. Social interaction is real-time, but there's no historic persistence for what you've been doing in the service."
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