Habbo HotelRaph has a post on his blog that references a PlayNoEvil post from the end of May talking about how Netease, the Chinese operator of Habbo, is selling physical items paired with virtual items now. For instance, order a bouquet of flowers and get a real delivery the next day. I’m not sure how interesting this really is. If I want to order flowers, I’ll order flowers. If I want to order virtual flowers, I’ll order virtual flowers. Rarely do I actually want virtual and real flowers, and given Habbo’s generally underage population, I hope they’re not encouraging teenagers to give out their real address so that others can send them virtual and physical gifts. (I can’t see a lot of use for the pairing besides gifting.)

What I think is potentially more useful to the end user in this kind of situation would be selling physical representations of in-game things where the value is largely created by the context of the game. Flowers exist regardless of the game, and there are better ways to buy flowers than from Habbo. But, for instance, Simutronics sells illustrated character portraits to its players. Those portraits are not great works of art, but the context of the game grants them value. Similarly, we’re looking into making custom-created 3d models of a player’s character (via a 3d printing process) available to players of our unannounced game.