Habbohotel, behind the scene

We had the opportunity to meet Sampo Karjalainen, the Chief Creative Officer of Sulake Oy and the original finder of Habbohotel, who visited UIAH on the 7 March 2006 to give an interesting presentation about Habbo Hotel, one of the most popular Internet virtual game in the world.

He explained that Habbohotel.com” was originally a Finnish online game, but it had been developing into a well-known online international hotel chains game. The game is the main product of Sulake Oy (Finland), which has been used by over 200.000 users in 17 countries in the world and translated into several languages. In his talk, Sampo shared to the audience the history, business strategy, design and development process of Habbo Hotel.

The original main target audience of the Habbo Hotel was Nordic youngsters from 13 to 16 years old, but their research indicated that the game is currently played by anyone from various ages and background both on computer-based as well as on mobile media.

Habbo Hotel game was designed to be different from any other online games. The game was designed as a social and casual game, which could easily be accessed and played by any ordinary people. It was expected that the game could be a means for self-expression and social orientation. Habbohotel is an open-ended game where each user can create and have their own goals. To play Habbo Hotel, each user need to have a user account, which one can get it easily for free from the Habbo Hotel website. Unless they want to buy something, such as rooms, furnitures, drinks or join any hotel clubs, this game is free. The players do not need to pay for anything. There are a lot of possibilities how users can interact with others by sending messages, chatting, treating others as well as building a personal relationship with anyone within the hotel spaces privately or publicly. As he said, the game emphasized on the self-expression, creativity and participation of the users.

Even though, playing Habbo Hotel on the mobile device is is getting popular, the common problems especially faced by youngsters are the cost of the fancy multimedia mobile telecommunication devices, data traffic cost, and Internet availability on the mobile devices.

Several issues that I have been thinking during the presentations are:

Habbo Hotel was originally developed based only game designers' ideas, based on some assumption on what it would be good for young people in Nordic countries. I was wondering if the company has done any specific user studies, testings and evaluation in different countries. They only mentioned that they conducted several playability testings. What about the interfaces or interactions in each hotel in each countries? I hope they have made some ethnographic studies in each country before they build their hotels there.

For Habbo mobile, Sampo said that the company has actually started exploring their innovative and creative mobile game concepts since 2000 before the technology was ready in the market. There have been a lot of challenges that the company has faced during the time until it launched its mobile product recently. I guess one of the success and sustainability factors of Sulake, more or less, were influenced by a supportive business environment in Finland, where small business can created, nurtured and developed with support from research, government institutions and bigger industrial organisations; by the maturity of the technology and by the willingness of the company to look at their competitors and change their own strategy to follow what their competitors do in order to survive.