The game’s Finnish maker is jointly owned by private Dutch advertising group Azerion and Finnish telecoms operator Elisa. “As the world has shut down, the more users have come along,” he added. Habbo Hotel has versions in nine languages, attracting most users in the Americas and Europe, Sulake’s Karu said. “Some people are finding it very distressing that they have to be home alone and are finding it hard to get things done when stuck indoors.” “I thought it was a fun idea to organise a party there, also out of nostalgia,” Pitkaranta said. Approximately 30 of her fellow students and friends joined the party at the end of last month.Ĭhina's tech crackdown continues with curbs on online gaming for kids
With all student events cancelled because of the lockdown, Pitkaranta decided to organise a virtual party at Habbo Hotel. One returning user is Pilvi Pitkaranta, a 23-year-old student at the University of Tampere who was an active player with her classmates about a decade ago.
They can also join virtual parties in search of new acquaintances. With a visual aesthetic likely inspired by retro video games of old, Habbo Hotel consists of rooms that players can decorate and where they can meet other players to chat or play games. Launched some 20 years ago, Habbo Hotel gained a following among teenagers before it was eclipsed by social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The exact user number growth figure is 213% since February 25,” game maker Sulake’s CEO Valtteri Karu told news agency Reuters, adding that this included hundreds of thousands of new and returning users. “Our traffic has tripled over the past month. With entire populations now in lockdown the game is gaining new interest, with hundreds of thousand of millennials look to rediscover a childhood favourite. “With this new technology, we can reward our Habbo players and content creators in a way that was not possible before.Remember Habbo Hotel? It was a hit online networking game more than a decade ago. “The launch of Habbo X will come as a result of our efforts to introduce new and existing Habbo residents to the innovative features made possible due to Web 3.0 technology,” said Jurriaan van Teunenbroek, Vice President of Games & Content at Azerion. “Our goal is to keep Habbo as a social pioneer of the endless possibilities available in the Web 3.0 metaverse.” “Habbo has always been at the forefront of creating virtual communities for social gamers and creators, and we want to spearhead this with the adoption of the new blockchain technologies,” said Valtteri Karu, CEO of Sulake. Habbo X will become the tenth Habbo hotel currently in operation and arrives nearly a decade after Habbo’s last hotel launch in 2012, Habbo Turkey, a fully localized version for Turkish speakers. With a focus on NFTs, play-to-earn, and tokenomics, Habbo X is a distinct space where the Habbo community and NFT communities can integrate, mingle, own their rooms, and create their own monetized play-to-earn games.
Sulake, part of the digital entertainment and media platform Azerion today announced its intention to expand Habbo with a brand new metaverse-based hotel to launch with full Web 3.0 integration later this year. Free-to-play, age-restricted game aims to reward room creators and designers with credits, tokens, and NFTs.