You are here: Though it didn't attract the biggest crowd at the show, Sulka Haro's keynote speech on Habbo Hotel delivered a lot of wry commentary and useful information on the building of successful online worlds.
Even though his world is mostly populated by 13-16 year olds - by his own admission - Sulake Labs' Haro noted there are lessons to be learned about broadening the appeal of products that touch on one or more of the tactics Habbo Hotel takes in developing its userbase.
The talk started with statistics. Habbo Hotel has approximately 7.5m unique players per month globally -- nipping at the heels of World of Warcraft. In the seven years since the game launched, 80 million accounts have been created. Globally, the game typically has 100,000 concurrent users playing at one time.
The creators of Habbo Hotel came from the web development community. According to Haro, habbohotel coins the team was originally "not much in gaming. We've since hired people from the games industry... the core product itself was really done from the web mindset of things."
It grew from a "Disco" project with just two rooms that attracted a surprising number of international players even though it was only available in Finnish. "Most of them couldn't understand Finnish but they still went through the registration... there was a massive crowd from Brazil who visited the site for some reason."
This project evolved into a snowball-fighting browser game, but here Sulka learned an important, early lesson. The game allowed players to buy better equipment. "People hate when you buy stuff that lets you do better in the game. There were a bunch of kids who couldn't do purchases..." These players soon grew frustrated with the players who could.
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