The decision to centralise trading in the official marketplace was akin to a real-world government shutting down shops and telling business owners they could only sell their goods in one, enormous state-run supermarket.

“Hell broke loose when in October, it was leaked that the bartering system was going to be removed,” says Kriegberg, a former player with over a decade of experience in the game, who despaired at the decision to remove one-to-one trading, an economic cornerstone that had been in place for over 17 years. But few could have predicted what was to come. The change had been a long time coming Habbo’s Finnish developers Sulake first broke the news of such a plan in 2018. Rosy forecasts were, however, tempered by an impending update and move away from the platform’s Flash client, scheduled to be discontinued and replaced with Unity by the end of 2020. “My items skyrocketed in value due to a tonne of users coming back”.įor long-serving traders like Malva, the vibrant economy was cause to celebrate.

“My in-game wealth essentially doubled,” says Malva, a player who co-founded The Coin Club, a 2,300-strong group created to re-energise the economy in periods of decline by setting members ‘wealth targets’. “When a lot of older players came back into the game, it meant a lot of items that were missing for years came back into the game” recalls Alastair, who initially joined Habbo in 2004 and returned during the pandemic, likening the appreciation in value to bitcoin. The platform’s population soared by 213 per cent between late February and late March, and the influx of nostalgic returnees revitalised the game’s comparatively stagnant economy. An article in Finnish business paper Talouselämä published in October of last year claimed Habbo had 850,000 players, but judging by recent player statistics, it looks more likely to be in the tens of thousands, 70 per cent of whom are adults.īefore Habbo’s end-of-year chaos, the platform had experienced a player surge as lockdowns came into force during the early months of 2020. In the face of adversity, Habbo’s loyal community typically trundles on – but accurate estimates of its size are increasingly elusive. A lack of moderation has put users in danger in the past, whereas scams, which the game’s terms of service dismiss as victim-induced ‘user errors’, are as common as you’d expect in a virtual environment purposefully designed to be hyper-consumerist. Over the years, these veterans have witnessed their fair share of dark periods.

Habbo hacking sites