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Well, ok, upon re-reading it all, I guess I can see your point.

Still, just to nitpick of the choice of an example:

Hmm... A quick trip to http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/ says "Habbos in the hotel: 5315". Doesn't look to me like that great an active population. I'm sure not only WoW, but even more minor players like CoH or AO can boast more players logged in at any given time. (At a wild guess, WoW only needs some 50 people or so on each server to beat that number.)

I'm assuming that's not total active population, but people currently logged in.

For an (admittedly not apples-to-apples) comparison to more traditional games, I went to Game Spy and looked at the box on the right side of the page. "192,921 gamers are online right now." at roughly the same moment. Half life alone clocks in at 54,228 players online ATM on the servers scanned by GameSpy. (I.e., excluding those who play it on a lan, or single-player, or whatever.)

I don't know, 5315 sounds like roughly 10 times less people in the successful non-game, compared to a 8 years old _game_. Maybe I chose the wrong moment to check, but it doesn't like sound _that_ impressive a success.

Some quick (and admittedly bogus) maths says that if the average player spent only 2 hours a day there (and ignoring variations like that now it's friday afternoon and it might have more players than at, say, 4 AM, but probably less than at 8 PM)... well, that would put the active population at some some 60,000 Habbos total.

I'm talking this time _active_ players, not just people who created an account last year and in the meantime forgot about it. By comparison, TSO was considered a flop when it peaked at 100,000 active accounts.

Also for something that's basically IRC with cutesy graphics, it kinda looks thin compared to the real IRC without graphics.

So not as a flame, but as genuine curiosity: by which criterion do you count it as the most successful virtual world, and more successful than WoW? In which metric did it beat WoW?

Habbo Hotel, anyone?

Habbo Hotel: Where unsuspecting male teenagers go to cyber with other male teenagers, BUT IN A VIRTUAL WORLD!

The loading times are what kept me from inadvertaently acting out homsexual fantasies.

Dial-up: Keeping the hetero mind free of deviance since 1977.

gmail invite

Ever heard of Habbo Hotel?

This is not new. The service by Sulake Labs Oy, Habbo Hotel has already achieved some popularity by selling "virtual furniture" to a game which is like Sim with bad graphics and a weak chat system. The furniture is paid by sending a SMS text message, so the spent money is charged in the phone bill. The users are usually kids, who can spend a terrible amount of money without realizing it. It is available in English: Habbo Hotel

Having played (and mocked) several instances of the There beta, I have to contend that this news story is even in the right place. There is not a game: there is no score, there is no goal, there is no point. There is merely a chatroom with avatars, vehicles, and pointless crap you can fritter away your money on. Would you call Habbo Hotel a "game," because it's the same thing that There is doing, at what I assume is a fraction of the cost.

Habbo Hotel is a goofy online community with pixelized characters that walk around and don't really do anything. But you can buy credits to furnish your online hotel room and send imaginary stuff to imaginary people.

I myself would find it difficult to justify my possession of an imaginary pixel credenza when there's so much poverty, homelessness, and I should probably get a real credenza first.

Personally, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to buy and sell virtual goods. It's not like this doesn't happen all the time in other areas; you're certainly not getting a real live performance when you download music from iTunes. What you are buying in both cases is entertainment, and though the electronic form blurs the distinction between goods and services, it's not really anything novel. (Not that it would surprise me if some USPTO drone sees matters otherwise.) There's even a fairly nifty graphical chat service for teens in the UK, Habbo Hotel, whose entire business model is based on selling virtual furniture for users' private chat rooms.

The idea that gaming-for-profit would somehow ruin the purity of online games is just silly. It's not like the game companies are doing this as a labor of love, after all. Considering all the other challenges their developers have faced, including active cheating, I'm sure they can find a way to maintain game balance for both "professional" gamers and amateurs.

I suspect that the main motivation the game companies have for prohibiting the sale of game items is their own legal liability. (There's probably also a great deal of internal debate on how they can get a cut of that action, too.)

I think it would be to their benefit to allow and encourage virtual trading via their own eBay-like percentage-taking interfaces rather than let it happen clandestinely in the wild. It might attract more paying users as well. I've never played anything like Everquest, but I might give it a spin if I could make a profit, or at least get the habit to pay for itself.

Check out Habbo Hotel.

It's a semi-massively multiplayer hotel where you can chat with other people. It's free, but to get furniture for your own rooms you have to pay.

-9mm-

It's oddly addictive, especially if you've got a bunch of friends that are also users.

-9mm-