Mobile Games and Habbo Hotel
August 9th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
I thought that HabboChina integrating in-game micropayments with real-life rewards was pretty impressive. Then I read about their third round of investment, with a view on taking Habbo mobile. Or, as MobileCrunch has it Sulake Corp Oy Nets EUR 6 Million to Mobilize Habbo Hotel for Japanese Teens.
So rosy are things for Sulake that they plan an IPO at the ‘end of next year’, according to GigaOM.
More importantly, though, is the possiblity to tie together the advances made by HabboChina with this investment in the Japanese Habbo Hotel. As an aside, it’s clear to see that localisation is massively important, not just to developers in Europe. It’s a notoriously difficult problem, in that it takes time and resources that a lot of companies don’t have. On top of that, a large number of dynamic languages have little or no builtin support for i18n. Localisation awareness amongst developers is also poor.
Imagine the potential, though, of a Habbo Hotel mobile game that presents the possibility to make in-game micropayments in return for desirable real-world goods. It puts Habbo in a great position when it comes to Avatar Based Marketing, where the ‘instant engagement’ of casual MMOs is well suited to marketing to an audience (and the audience are using devices like portalable torpedos (right quote), devices that are setup for small payments, everyware-ness and dip-in and out of gaming.
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