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September 09, 2007
How To Be Habbo Hotel - Tips on Going Global
Sulake Labs, the VC-backed Finnish startup behind Habbo Hotel and IRC Galleria is a success story that by now offers up a few lessons for other social networking and roleplaying business.
Founded way back in 2000, it has come a long way since sister site, the alarm:clock, tipped it two and half year ago as having a business model with some staying power.
The latest insights into its experience and its numbers comes via a techmeme item that started with a Gamasutra report on the tactics Habbo Hotel took in developing its userbase, an article that has plenty of tips on socnet community management, virtual currencies, and handling cultural issues in a global market.
GigaOm commented on Gamasutra's coverage that with an estimated $77M in annual sales its "phenomenal success" continues to be "criminally under-appreciated" by the game industry.
Here are some snippets:
Credit cards and prepay cards are cool -- but they just don't cut it in the global market for selling to kids.... There's a massive difference between selling currency and selling property... Teenagers really do get the fact that you own a piece of property and you get to trade it.
Sulake's software developers have been converted it seems to using the Scrum approach for product development:
"We switched to Scrum last year and it's doubled the productivity of the teams. But Scrum is kind of hard to do. You need to fully embrace it -- that means that people have to really let go."[more on Scrum can be found at the Scrum Alliance]
the [virtual] items on Habbo Hotel in 2007 have a total market value of around 550,000,000.And some insights into the Habbo communities...
How to be popular in a soc net? Be nice."Habbo Hotel also has MySpace-like profile pages. He showed a popular profile of a Finnish user. The guestbook has more than 30,000 comments in it -- and this is just a regular user. She's just doing well in the world and being polite."War of the worlds: single-color versus multicolor. "There's actually this huge war between the single-colored groups and the multicolored groups."
Inexplicable fantasies: This is McDonalds -- there are people who are roleplaying a minimum wage job... it's all roleplay, you can't carry the food or anything. They're just emoting. ...There's lots of armies. Mafias are really popular as well. They can't do anything... they're just wearing the suit and standing there. They'll emote that they're punching something."
Posted on September 9, 2007 07:56 AM | Posted to Being European | Media | Permalink
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