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That Ian Baverstock! 
I just got a bulk email from GDC ‘07 that contains Mr. Baverstock’s (he’s on the GDC Advisory Board, though I’ve never met the man) recommended sessions for the Business & Management track, and one of them is the roundtable Dan James and I will be holding again this year. Put on that fur, straighten the brim of your peacock-feathered hat, slide on into your gold-rimmed Caddy, Mr. Baverstock (Or I.B. Pimpin’ as he’s known in some circles), and get to work. Ain’t nobody your equal in this game.
[self-pimp]I’m also doing a lecture with Sulka Haro (lead designer on Habbo Hotel) and Erik Bethke (CEO of GoPets Live).[/self-pimp]
In an article on Gamasutra 
announcing that MTV and Nexon are partnering to promote Maple Story, Kart Rider, and Audition, it was also revealed that this partnership will also result in Neopets (which thus far has not taken money from users, preferring to garner 100% of revenue from ads), will begin selling virtual items to its users.
This is big news. Neopets, while not a virtual world, is an online games community that has a larger reach than any of the big three Western virtual worlds: World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel, and Runescape. For what it’s worth, its Alexa ranking is 150 vs. 566 for WoW (lower is better) and 821 for Runescape. Habbo Hotel is split across multiple websites, so there’s no number to compare there. (Take those numbers with a big grain of salt. Alexa is not horribly reliable except as a general indicator of website traffic. People have to access Runescape and Neopets via the website, but not WoW.) However you stack it up though, Neopets is absolutely massive, and it’s pretty big news in the virtual asset sales department to see them adding this model onto their existing model.
EMI label Innocent is set to debut their new boy band ‘365′ in Habbo UK this week. I don’t find this particularly interesting in and of itself, but the contrast between the pre-event coverage this has received and similar coverage the same event would likely receive in, say, Second Life is interesting…and depressing, considering Habbo is at least 30-40x the size of Second Life, with comparably larger cultural influence.
I sometimes wonder if the fact that Habbo is made for kids causes such a big industry blindspot for so many journalists and commentators. I wonder the same thing about Runescape, which is only about 30% smaller than Habbo. I talk to a fair number of people whose positions would normally cause me to assume at least basic knowledge of the virtual world space (VCs looking to invest in it, for instance) that have no idea what either Runescape or Habbo Hotel are. I’d assume their ignorance isn’t willful and results instead from the fact that they simply are rarely talked about in virtual world circles.
I
s Habbo Hotel making a run at MySpace, at least in the younger teen market, by taking more of a Cyworld-esque approach? Habbo has recently rolled out user home pages for its users, but only on the Finnish Habbo for now. You can see the page describing the system (in Finnish) at http://www.habbo.fi/home
An example of one of the more developed home pages at this point that I found is here. There’s a translation of the main content area of the page below, but I wanted to comment first.
Habbo Hotel, one of the top three virtual worlds in terms of users (along with Runescape and World of Warcraft), had an interesting event happen in their American site yesterday (they are very country-specific, and operate separate products in almost two dozen countries): The (admittedly, straight to DVD) new animated movie “Ultimate Avengers 2″ premiered an exclusive 10 minute segment from the opening of the movie in the Theatredome (an admin-controlled room in-world used for viewing theatre-type stuff). Afterwards, players were invited to join Marvel-themed Habbos (Captain America, the Hulk, etc) and chat with them.
Pretty neat promotion.
Raph 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.