Since 2000, the Finnish development team Sulake has developed a free-to-play virtual social platform by the name of Habbo – or Habbo Hotel for those of us who grew up playing the earliest iterations of it. While it has undoubtedly had a few rocky moments in its history around safety, the concept around Habbo is that it is a digital hotel targeted towards teenagers, allowing friends to meet and network virtually in a moderated environment. Being given the ability to build my own rooms and create my habbo back in the days was certainly appealing.
One issue with the foundations of Habbo is that it is built on Flash, which as of next week will be depreciated as of next week. Sulake have been working to port the platform across to the Unity engine, and as of today have launched its official open beta – starting the full transfer of the game which they claim “will lead to a more secure and overall more polished experience”. Through the end of 2020 Habbo will run simultaneously in Flash and the Open Beta in Unity, however starting January 1, 2021 the virtual hotel will only be available in Unity.
The new Habbo client is also planned to offer a number of new features in the coming weeks and months, including player vaults and a new avatar levelling system.
We are very excited to launch the Open Beta for Habbo 2020 today in Unity, which will allow us to vastly improve the user experience while still providing the most loved features of the original, just more polished and streamlined. Our developers are hard at work building older and more complicated features into Habbo 2020 with the Unity game engine so that we can have all of your favorite features ready and working in future releases. We’ll keep you up to date with our progress on our website and social media pages, so drop by and let us know what you think!
Valtteri Karu – CEO of Sulake
