A letter to the Habbo Community
GM all!
It’s been a while since I’ve given an update. Lots has happened with Habbo in the past few months. In addition, there has been a fair amount happening inside the Habbo team in terms of structure.
Long story short, since January 2024 I have been Habbo’s Product Director. This means I am in charge of all things related to Habbo. I am extremely excited to take this position and to start finding ways to bring back the Habbo you all love!
I’ve been with Sulake for over ten years now; I started as the Business Intelligence Specialist, then the Lead Game Designer for Hotel Hideaway and the past two plus years as the Product Director of Habbo NFTs (now called Habbo Collectibles). You probably know me as the “NFT guy” and it is true that I am a huge believer in web3, but my focus as the Product Director of Habbo will not be to make Habbo a web3 game. I want to enhance the Habbo experience with web3 elements but I see web3 as an extension of Habbo’s engagement, events and activity program.
My main goal for Habbo will be to improve the activities and to find ways to have more engaging events. Our first experiment with this was to add quests and seasonal currency – you can play, complete quests and earn seasonal currency which you can then use to purchase some seasonal items from the in-game Shop. In the coming months we want to start including more and more activities that can earn you seasonal currency as you play. We also want to have more achievements as those give fun goals for players to reach and things to do in game. Also, note: there is no reason why Quest rewards always have to be Collectibles! Sometimes we may make them regular items.
The challenge we have been facing in the past few years is the Modern client. In my view, and as many people in the community have pointed out over the years, the Modern client isn’t ready to be used as the main client for Habbo. It also doesn’t make sense to promote it as such to the current community, or people who are returning to the game, either. Therefore, a big thing we will do soon is to simplify the Habbo launcher by having one main option to play Habbo (the Classic client), and to remove the WebGL client option from Habbo’s front page. The Modern client will be labeled as a beta version of Habbo in the launcher. The Classic client will be the main Habbo client until we are happy with the Modern client.
Focusing on the Classic client means that we will aim to release new features and updates first on the Classic client, and then later bring them to the Modern client. We will aim to bring all the new features to Modern client as well but there will most likely be a delay between Classic client and Modern client releases. The main focus with the Modern client will be to improve its performance and overall feel and it will take months, if not years, to get this right. With a new, portrait-orientated chat mode for the mobile app (the Habbo Messenger), we will make the mobile experience better, and we’ll continue to improve the UI in both the desktop and mobile versions of the Modern client to make it more acceptable to the community. Then, we will keep the Modern client as the main client for Habbo X and have Habbo X as the place for seasonal events until we are happy with it.
As well as introducing new features like Wired 2.0 functionality, the Habbo Messenger, other smaller features that don’t relate directly to Collectibles (watch this space), and a significant update to the Marketplace, we will continue adding Collectibles-related features to Habbo with the goal to make using them seamless in the ecosystem. In-game trading, Marketplace usage, and core features you use on the Collectibles website today like opening gift boxes and crafting are all being worked on and will enable us to start giving reward boxes in-game.
We also haven't forgotten about the expansion of Collectibles features like Clothing Factories, indeed if you check our long term vision, we’ve done a really huge amount we set out to do. More exciting Collectibles-related features will come, and I've been keeping up with the feedback on what the community is the most excited about.
I’m very excited for what’s to come for the rest of this year, and you should be too!