Habbo Hotel has been around since 2001. It has had many changes and is now at version 8. Habbo Hotel is owned by Sulake Labs of Finland. It is an online virtual chat room. You can talk, dance, swim, design rooms, buy furniture, and even play games. It is very cool.

There are 15 Habbo Hotels, with Habbo Hotel China coming out by next fall. Habbo UK and USA seem to be the most popular. Each hotel has managers, workers, moderators, or MODs as they are called at Habbo, and Hobbas, or Hotel Guides. Every hotel has big events with games, contests, prizes, or celebrity apperances. Ashlee Simpson came just today on Habbo USA.

Habbo Club is one of the many ways to have fun. Habbo Club is a special club in which you get special furniture, as a Habbovillans call them, furni, more room layouts, acess to special rooms, a cool badge, and special dances. Furni is the hotels furniture. There is a catalog in which you purchase these items. You have to buy coins from Habbo. You can buy them with many methods including credit card, check, money order, pay-pal, text msg., and home phone. Coins generally run from $5.00 to $50.00 and are good all the time.

There are maybe around 10,000 people tht play on each hotel. Today on Habbo USA, there were about 7,550 Habbos online. Well this is aobut all I have to say aboput it, but please check it out.

Habbo Hotel
www.habbohotel.com

Yeah.. I go on it, but is it that neccessary to pay real bucks for furnitures? Hm, I wonder what really makes the people pay :\ I'd never do that though.

Habbo hotel is one of, if not the best, marketing scheme aimed at teenagers. It takes chat a step further, by making it a real-like environment in which they can interect with each other. The use of furni and such is to get the teens to pay (more often with text messages) for the company. There must be thousands, if not millions, of USD ($) going into habbo every week. And by expanding their online business beyond the confinements of one language, they are seizing the true potential of online business.

You still need to pay (poo). Still not as fun. I recomend Cokemusic.com (made by same company).



This post has been edited by twitch: Dec 19 2005, 09:23 AM

HabboHotel must be doing quite well as they are now advertising it a lot at finnish TV.

I personally find their practise a bit questionable... They are obviously targeting teenagers and as far as I'm concerned they (at least here) allow payment through SMS, ie. sending a message and then will be charged in the phone bill. Selling something virtual for a 12 year old and (practcally) for credit is a tad questionable. Well I guess parents should pay attention...

Yeah, now all those little kids with their own mobile phone, now call themself to habbo to get credits. So the parents have nothing to say about it.
I agree with you there, that parents should be more alert to these things.

Mark

yeah, stop playing this a few months ago. Like Hercco said, this game had benn advertsing alot of time in Tv so does here - Singapore. It's like a chatting room that's 3D. With this, it will surely attract teenagers to be involve in this game.

I use to prefer Virtual Worlds like AWABA when they were around, free and fun to build, but sadly no longer exists, or atleast to my knowledge.

Just read yesterday that there are over 5 million world of warcraft players now. What's with this trend that people play so much of those 'alternate reality chatting and stuff' games. I mean, why would you want to play such a game, you have a life of your own. Don't get me wrong, I play games too, but only FPS games because that's something you can't do in reallife and get away with it

Could someone explain what is so much fun about spending your time chatting with other characters in a game-world. Is it a substitute social life or something???? :|

I mean, pwning them is so much more fun

Because then you can do things you can't do in the real world?