Habbo 2011: €44 million. Habbo 2013: €10 million.

[HabMoon]

Habbo has been around for nearly 15 years, and over that time it has became the largest community for teenagers across the world with over 250 million accounts created and more than a billion views on the homepages of each hotel each month. However not everything is pitch perfect, and us users have known that for a few years now.

Kauppalehti, a Finnish business newspaper has recently released figures on the catastrophic financial health of Sulake, the company that operates Habbo.

In 2011, Sulake made EUR 44.8 million - a record performance, and saw Sulake preparing to sell off its IRC-Galleria website.
In 2012, Sulake made EUR 22.6 million - a rigid divide in Sulakes revenues, some could blame this upon the mute, whereby Sulake having to throw a lot of resources into improving their moderation and satisfying their shareholders (?).
In 2013, Sulake made EUR 10.5 million - again the turnover had been halved, this could be down to user decline, the rise in pirate hotels & illegal credit trading taking off.

It is also recorded by Kauppalehti that Sulake itself only has 43 staff members working for them in 2013. This excludes outsourced moderation and probably staff who are hired under Elisa (for example, the Stories team).But, alas - one man struggles while another relaxes, the Elisa company released their 2013 figures at the begininng of this year showing where the pot of money is at, with a turnover of a billion pounds.

Sources:
http://www.kauppalehti.fi/yritykset/...on+oy/16036286
http://mangetoica.com/archives/72629
http://vuosikertomus.elisa.fi/en/

It's now or never Sulake, or else it won't look pretty in the near future.

[MentaL]

[iRetro™]

Muscab is stealing there money and members. Peace.

[Mathis Hbx]

We also forget the arrival of Adblock (which can block ads on websites) it's a very big loss

[Muscab]

You can clearly see this isn't the doing of Retros, if anything Retros have since decreased in user count the same way Habbo has lost users as well.
I'd blame the whole channel 4 / mute & merge.

[tehDrunk]

We also forget the arrival of Adblock (which can block ads on websites) it's a very big loss

Adblock can easily be blocked using code stuff... The real big loss for sulake was remove too many staffs and promotions in all hotels that made many users stop playing.

[Lor Is]

The results of 2014 will be even worse than the previous because a lot of users left Habbo when they banned gambling.

[vLife]

We all knew it was coming. They single handily destroyed their own game. Don't give people what they don't want. Also factoring most of their players have come of age and don't find it as fun or interesting anymore.

[lRetros]

We all knew it was coming. They single handily destroyed their own game. Don't give people what they don't want. Also factoring most of their players have come of age and don't find it as fun or interesting anymore.

Totally agree, they had a lot of time to change the situation and give people what they want and I think now is a little bit late, they're focused on what they shouldn't.

[Unphased]

Habbo shot up with activity over many years and It's only just now that we notice the grinding halt it approaches. Habbo is like a brand that 'used' to be popular, it was released, everyone loved it and soon it will never be heard of again.

Shame.

[Lewis]

This also comes to people just simply "growing up". They are not attracting the younger audience they used to, infact they're not really attracting any new players at all. I used to see advertisements everywhere regarding Habbo, I rarely see these now. No more little kids to milk their parents credit cards dry for coins.

[Carlosso]

Like Lewis said, a few years ago there were television advertisements about Habbo. Now there isn't..

[Shorty]

Blame technology and the game model.

[MentaL]

Remember all the bad press about child paedophilia and all those game cards getting pulled? Thats going to hurt..

[brandonsuxx]

They honestly nailed their coffin when they banned casinos. I don't feel any sympathy for them as they have continuously ignored and voided their community.

Less players = less money = less staff and/or more ads and higher prices = player unhappiness, then it just loops itself.

[maritnmine]

Sulake made a huge mistake: They didn't go mobile. Now it's too late.

[NoOne96]

I'm waiting for sulake to lisence retroes, that could really happen if the usercount keeps dropping..

You can clearly see this isn't the doing of Retros, if anything Retros have since decreased in user count the same way Habbo has lost users as well.
I'd blame the whole channel 4 / mute & merge.

Yup, 2012 finnish retro community had 1,5-2k retroplayers and nowadays max. 700 :/ Habbo.fi had 1.5k players aswell and nowadays less than 500.

[Amirul Halim]

habbo was cool back then, with all less tight regulations and stuff. The reason why i left habbo was simply because of the new credit system. 2c to buy 1c. That's insane! I really enjoyed it back then. Now as an adult, i could see the destruction of habbo brought by sulake itself there is no way habbo could get back in their glory days.

[Matthew]

• Failed to provide any form of user feedback scheme, would often go and do things against the communities will or consent.
• Updated to an already dieing platform, flash, way too late. The update to flash should've been done back in '05-06.
• Removes gambling which is a fundamental reason as to why people use Habbo. Adding to a general decline in their product, they decided to shoot themselves in the foot.
• Removes localised moderators who actually play and enjoy the game, communicate with members and are APART of the community, replaces them with sweat-shop Asian workers who only work for the $$$.
• Creates an iPad-only app and releases it in 2014, even though Android dominates the global market. They wanted to jump on the Apple hype and they did it way too late. Habbo iPad should have been done many years ago. The iPad fad has come and gone, it's all about Google now.

These are my opinions as to why it's a failing business. I've probs missed something major out. Should've spent the money on developing an Android app rather than trying to legally pursue someone who was probably holding your community together for you and actually providing a decent experience of your game (Aaron).

[The General]

Back in the days fun was the most important thing and their focus. Without fun for players they will eventually loose players and so it happened when they started focussing on the money:

- Limited rare furniture.
- Room bundles
- Credit system (1c fee on every redeemable item)

Now since they banned casino's and anything gambling related, they are just backstabbing themself. Gambling is what keeps Habbo going and what makes them earn money.

Habbo changed through the years and you can clearly see they are struggling. Back in the days you would get a new furniture line about every 4 - 5 months. Now its almost every month. Also the rare furniture were just 25 credits and they were on sale for a month. Now they are selling limited furniture for 250 credits. I mean, regular players don't have that and thats where the fun gets taken away.

[FullmetalPride]

Flash is hardly a dying platform. It's just gone out of focus for online gaming.

Don't jump on the HTML5 bandwagon. It's hardly in its infancy as a platform. It still yet has to prove itself worthy.

That said, there's no question its losing out to mobile. Unfortunately, those days are gone for MMOCCs like Habbo. Like Habbo, we, too, are a dying race. But that's not a problem. We've had our fun and sucked Habbo dry, and though the later years weren't the best, they were okay.

Let's be cynical and watch a dinosaur like Sulake kill itself like the seemingly self-destructive company it is 8)


Another thing: If I know anything about online MMOCCs, the shareholders won't just vote it down the drain. They'll build something worse. Point-in-case: Spineworld to Migoland.

[Bloodraven]

What really killed Habbo was what Martin said, not adapting to the technological climate. (e.g mobile). Google and Apple saw this smartphone boom coming in 2007 where both started on iPhone OS (now iOS) and Android. Habbo thrived until 2011 when affordable smartphones could be bought as less as £150 (Xperia U or whatever it is). Habbo continued to do what they had done for 10 years prior when their players just jumped ship onto the smartphone bandwagon, there are better games than Habbo for free on the Play Store & App Store that don't require purchasing ingame content to enjoy.

If they had moved their platform to Android and iOS they may have still been going strong but... that's technology, changes every day, those who adapt survive and those who don't die. (Technology companies)

[Squashing]

You can almost tell Habbo doesn't care about the players anymore. Did you remember the time that you got free credits if there was a event like Christmas?And nowadays players aren't loyal like back in the days.

Shame on Habbo

[Hoshiko]

Flash is hardly a dying platform. It's just gone out of focus for online gaming.

Don't jump on the HTML5 bandwagon. It's hardly in its infancy as a platform. It still yet has to prove itself worthy.

You sir, you do live in the past. Take a look at this thing called 'the web'. It's full of adventarous things and maracles places, all of which happen to be written using HTML5 technologies.

I do advise you to stop using Bing on your Windows 7 laptop by the way, it indeed gives you an older view of 'the web'.

[FullmetalPride]

You sir, you do live in the past. Take a look at this thing called 'the web'. It's full of adventarous things and maracles places, all of which happen to be written using HTML5 technologies.

I do advise you to stop using Bing on your Windows 7 laptop by the way, it indeed gives you an older view of 'the web'.

Bing? What are you talking about?

HTML5 refers to the new specification which includes new features. I am, specifically, talking about the canvas feature due to its popular use as a game platform. However, it's nowhere near as advanced as Flash. And it's nowhere near as fun.

I can compile a game in a single SWF file. It is like an EXE, in that if it gets decompiled, the class names will be different, and the code will be messy to edit. And you can download any of the CSS/JS/Media you want!

Sure you can minify your JS and make it hard to read, but in the end its easy to re-format.

I'm not bashing HTML5, I'm saying that its not going to suddenly sweep over the web and take programmers by storm. There are multiple problems with complex solutions.

Also, ActionScript is superior because it's OOP. Isn't it best to represent things as they are on-screen; as objects?

This isn't code discussion, anyways. Topic, pls

[Joopie]

The reason canvas is not near as "advanced" as flash is because canvas has a wider possibility and flexibility. In the end canvas can and is more advanced then flash however, not programming wise (libraries like threejs and pixijs makes it come very close!)

Extended libraries like WebGL (which is not part of the html5 specification, correct me if I'm wrong) can do great things and the way it works has some similarities in comparison with the opengl for application software.

Again everything that flash offers can be made with JavaScript and canvas!

You also state that JavaScript is not OO is sort of incorrect. JavaScript has support for object oriented programming but not like you know. However programming huge JavaScript projects can be a pain in the ass when talking about readability and design wise.

Also your concern is right about editing everything on the flow bla bla, but keep in mind that flash is also a open file specification. Meaning you can make decompilers and gues what, they are already here! But personally I prefer to read that Asasm file from habbo then reading minified JavaScript files, just because JS is weakly-typed and the only thing to keep track of it is by documenting and guess what, it will be removed by the minifier :)