Before Meta, there was Habbo: How social games laid the framework for the metaverse

Meta — the corporation formerly known as Facebook — has firmly joined the ranks of metaverse-building companies such as Roblox and Epic Games.

But the concept of deeply social digital spaces far predates Fortnite and its ilk: early social games such as Habbo have quietly been building the metaverse for years. With mountains of accrued virtual assets and decades of history, these early metaverse platforms are looking to recapture their rightful slice of the virtual world to come.

Founded as Habbo Hotel in 2000, Habbo is an online community marked by pixelated avatars and items existing within an arcade-evoking isometric landscape. The platform allows users to socialize in virtual “hotels,” with public rooms accessible to all and private rooms that can be tricked out with custom-crafted digital items. At the moment, the platform boasts about 850,000 monthly active users and 320 million total accounts, according to Jorge García Guerra, a product owner at Azerion, a digital entertainment firm that acquired Habbo developer Sulake in January.

During its heyday in the mid-2000s, Habbo was wildly popular among teens and early adolescents — including this Digiday reporter, who made an account as a 12-year-old in 2007. At the time, the platform’s shoddy moderation practices were par for the course for the early internet, and it soon developed a shady reputation, culminating in a 2012 VICE article titled “We Met a Pedophile on Habbo Hotel.” “The situation has changed a lot since 2010–2012,” García Guerra said, listing safety tools such as mute buttons, 24/7 monitoring and word filters blocking the sharing of personal information.

It also helps that Habbo’s user base has grown up alongside it. The Habbo power user Pulx, who was elected its “president of fun” in a platform-wide election last year and requested anonymity, has logged in almost every day since creating his account in 2005. “These days, it’s quite rare to actually talk to somebody under the age of 18 on Habbo,” Pulx said. “I’d say that the core demographic is 20-plus.”

Nowadays, the average Habbo user (or “Habbo”) uses it as more than simply a distraction from homework. Instead, these older and wiser Habbos are beginning to take advantage of the platform to live their lives in increasingly metaversal ways.

“I know people that have met on Habbo, got married, had children — there’s literally all of that,” Pulx said. “I logged on Habbo during COVID and I met somebody that I was friends with when I was like 13 or 14. There are cases where people have passed in real life, and their stuff is still in the game, and people sometimes go in their rooms and sit down and kind of grieve that person.”

These behavioral and demographic shifts have been a priority for the developers of Habbo as they have built “Habbo 2020,” a rebooted version of the platform designed with the Unity game engine. When early versions of the rejuvenated Habbo lacked longstanding elements such as item trading, the user base …read more

Source:: Digiday