| Helsinki, Finland -- December 23, 2020 -- Social entertainment company, Sulake, announced today that Habbo's much-anticipated move from Flash to Unity has now entered Open Beta, starting the full transfer of the virtual social and gaming platform to a new client that 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. Many of the same beloved features are being prepped and revamped to make the move to Unity, including the Marketplace and trading system, while the new Habbo client will also introduce a number of new features including vaults and a new avatar leveling 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," said Sulake CEO Valtteri Karu. "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!" One of the original free-to-play virtual communities, Habbo's focus on providing a safe and fun online space for self-expression held wide appeal for tweens and teens in the 2000's and 2010's. However, now the demographic tracks a bit older (young adults over 19 years make up 71% of the current player base) as the player base has grown up with Habbo and many have returned to the game during various COVID-19 lockdowns. Throughout the course of its long and illustrious history, Habbo has celebrated widespread international success with 9 language versions and over 316M registered avatars in over 115 countries, creating over 500M rooms. Multiple awards have been showered on the service, including Fast 500 EMEA (2005), Best Community Site, Site of the Year (MetrixLab, multiple awards from 2006-2015), Global Safest Social Network (the European Commission, 2011) and the Nokia Foundation Award (2008), but the Habbo innovation doesn't stop there. It was also one of the first online virtual communities to secure numerous advertising partnerships with over 300 brands from a wide variety of sectors and major celebrity features. These include musical artists Pink, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Ozzy Osbourne and blockbuster films such as the Harry Potter series, the Twilight series, Fantastic Four and many more. |
