On January 16, the hashtag #NOTMYHABBO began trending globally on Twitter. Dozens of Habbo players burst into the game's foyer led by the Twitch streamer Quackity, who’d emerged as the de facto vanguard of a protest that had been simmering in the community for weeks. Together, they joined dance animations and cried out for Habbo's developer, the Finnish studio Sulake, to reverse some recent changes that were tearing the community apart at the seams.
#NOTMYHABBO, #SAVEHABBO, and #WEARETHEGAME were all rallying cries for the community of fans. Nearly two decades after the release of Habbo Hotel, and long after the game had become a touchstone for bored, juvenile afternoons around the world, its remaining denizens were gripped by a struggle to preserve the soul of their childhood.For those unfamiliar with the situation, Habbo Hotel — like most browser games of the early 2000s — was built on Adobe Flash. That infrastructure had grown increasingly unreliable in recent years, (as Flash is notorious for its gaping security flaws,) and many companies started phasing out the software on their own platforms. Adobe announced in 2017 that Flash would be officially discontinued at the end of 2020, which forced a number of internet institutions still clinging to the archaic framework to come up with a transition plan or abandon ship. One of the games on the chopping block was Sulake's Habbo Hotel, which indicated that it would pivot to a new version of Habbo — called Habbo 2020 — on a rebuilt client powered by Unity, which is currently in open beta.None of that was particularly controversial. Habbo lifers wanted to play their game into the next generation, and if that required a pivot to fresher software, then so be it. Countless other ancient internet curios have gone on the same journey — Homestar Runner, for example, left Flash behind for a YouTube channel — and nobody blinked an eye. The difference here is that, alongside the updated client, Sulake unveiled a number of changes that chafed the community. Chief among them: the developer was doing away with classic, player-to-player item trading.For years, Habbo residents grew accustomed to opening a window with an in-game friend, and exchanging furniture, (known as "furni" within the community,) with no middleman — similar to the informal barter economy seen in most MMOs. Now, all trading is restricted to the in-game Marketplace, which functions like a typical gaming auction house. You list your bounty of Habbo goods to the general public, who can bid their hard-earned credits to add those items to their inventory. Sulake plans to eventually add functionality to sell furni directly with someone on your friends list, but only if you put your furni up for auction as a "private" listing on the Marketplace, adding an extra burden of bureaucratic annoyance to a previously convenient transaction."[Trading was] used to give away prizes, or just help people out, and hand out items," says one 26-year old Habbo user, who goes by the name Pulx, and is one of the leading voices in the #SaveHabbo campaign. "You can't trade furniture between one another [anymore,] because the marketplace runs on credits. So it's not possible to trade furniture for furniture anymore."
On top of that, Sulake has administered a scaling tax on anything posted to the Marketplace, which can ring up a significantly higher charge than in the previous incarnation of Habbo. Habbo Hotel's currency can either be purchased with real money, or acquired through the completion of certain in-game achievements, and by filling out third-party surveys on the Habbo website, making it one of the most valued commodities in the game. According to Pulx, players gave up a mere one percent levy (rounded up) on the price of whatever item they brought to market on the Flash client. The Unity pivot has increased that tariff exponentially. In October, Sulake reported that a 60,000 credit sale price would result in a 23,400 fee, further adding to a feeling of alienation from the game's original culture.
Sulake, of course, has their own reasons for all of these changes. In multiple messages posted to the game's website, the company argues that consolidating all of Habbo Hotel's trading functionality to one Marketplace will help cut down on some of the fraud that can run rampant in any MMO game. "Stopping the transfer of unlimited amounts of furni between accounts makes stealing the furni from hacked accounts much harder. Face to face trading and trading furni for furni allows for the sale of high value items for real money on the black market," writes a spokesperson in an FAQ from December 2020. As for the tax hike, Sulake claims the intention is actually player-friendly, and will cut down on price gouging in Habbo’s marketplace. "Much less is deducted when you sell low to medium priced items compared to the really high priced ones," continues the FAQ. "The idea is that it should gradually guide traders to use lower prices."
But these explanations haven't satisfied some of the most incensed parts of the Habbo community, and the protest continues unabated. Quackity's lobby demonstration is just the tip of the iceberg, he claims, and he articulates the concerns of the community succinctly in a clip from his stream in the middle of the January 16 event. "Habbo was part of my childhood. It's very upsetting to see them take away the trading," he says. "That's what the game thrived on, to win prizes and stuff like that. I understand the security measures they've taken on, but the reality is, it's not a feature you can just take off."There are now #SaveHabbo rap songs, and #SaveHabbo mourning demonstrations, where players stand listlessly around a graveyard. Whatever you may feel about this silly old Flash game, clearly, these changes have hit close to home for many.
"[There's] over 20 years of written history in the hotel," says Habbo user Kriegberg, another prominent voice in the #SaveHabbo contingency, when I asked why he was so passionate about the sanctity of this game all this time later. "Being able to reminisce about the good old times with friends and time travel back to rooms that had stayed untouched for almost two decades definitely had its charm."
Pulxtakes that sentiment a step further. Throughout his years on Habbo — as he browsed through the thousands of different niches, like a living, breathing McDonald's restaurant, that take residence on these servers — he's arrived at an undeniable conclusion: Habbo is special to him because of what the community does with the canvas. Pulxnotes the nodes of hardcore role-players who transform their hotel rooms into perfect fascimilies of Hogwarts or Rivendell, or the mercantile capitalists who collect, haggle, and short furni every day, keeping close attention to the subtle fluctuations in supply and demand like a seasoned day-trader obsessing over $GME stock. "It's a huge creative adventure with incredibly diverse people and diverse activities," Pulxsays. "There is a tool kit here that makes Habbo something that anyone can mould into anything they like, creating hours of content."
He says that's what saddens him the most about the uncertain future of Habbo: that there's no bloodless way to alter a video game that's become so entwined with global millennial adolescence. People are going to take it personally. How could they not?
"They've ravaged the ecosystem, and many of us simply cannot operate as we did before. We are limited, restricted, and in some ways the features we relied on have been removed entirely," finishes Pulx. "So now we are at a crossroads."
It really is that simple. Habbo has been a fixture in digital culture for so long that for those who are still playing it, losing the soul of the game is equivalent to losing the internet itself. Are reforms on the way? Will the community eventually adjust to the changes? Is there an end in sight to one of the most influential video games of all time? Nobody can say for sure, but the struggle continues – one blocky, isometric hotel room at a time. Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.