A long term vision for the Habbo X ecosystem

GM all, Muumiopappa here 👋

After we released the vision for Habbo earlier this year, there were a lot of comments from the community about some of the first features we talked about like NFT galleries, social media integrations, Habbo X room blueprints, etc.

With the team, I’ve been working on a more long term vision for the Habbo X ecosystem that includes pretty much everything we want to achieve in the long term. You can find it below (and on our website). There are more detailed descriptions of what each item means at the bottom.

• Green = completed
• Yellow = backlog
• Blue = in progress

It’s important to note that we may release features from different stages at the same time, or not in the precise order specified above. For example, we may release something from Stage 6 even if we have not released everything from Stage 2.

The above graphic mainly aims to categorise the different concepts we’re working on and draw a picture of where we aim to go, and the (very rough) order in which we’re focusing on features.

Stage 0 — Habbo Avatar Drop

The project started off as an experiment to see if there was interest in Habbo and web3. We released the first batch of NFTs in September 2021 and integrated them into Habbo. This was the first step on the road of bringing Habbo to web3!

• Habbo Avatar Drop. In September 2021, the team dropped a collection of 11.9k Habbo Avatars.
• Avatar integration in Habbo. In December 2021, they were integrated into Habbo and became fully usable there.
• In-game perks in Habbo. As part of the Habbo Avatar integration in December 2021, owners were given certain perks in Habbo. These included free Habbo Club and Builders Club membership.
• Trait editing and Crafted Avatars. We wanted to give our avatar holders the chance to create an Avatar they love, so we released the Crafted Avatars collection in June 2023. We’re planning to release some features that focus on our avatars — such as clothing factories — in the coming months and years.
• Clothing Factory. As one of the key utilities of Habbo X Rooms is the ability to “create” furni, we aim to add similar functionality to our avatars as well. We’re still looking at different options; there’s the potential to either have a similar approach to Furni Factories and crates, or move more towards a custom outfits route where instead of individual clothing items you “manufacture” full outfits. Regardless of the approach, we believe that the effect should have a similar impact in the factory as the size and the design rarity have with rooms.

Stage 1 — Habbo Integrations

The first steps focused on integrating web3 to many different aspects of Habbo. This included furni and clothing which enabled us to start dropping in-game Habbo NFTs. We also released our own off-chain currency — NFT Credits. This stage has now been concluded as we can release all sorts of Habbo items as ownable web3 assets.

• Furni and clothing integrations. In 2022, the team released both NFT items (furni) and clothing, all fully usable in Habbo and hosted on leading L2 solution Immutable X.
• Other in-game item integrations. The team released a collection on Immutable X called Add ons. For now, this contains just badges. But in the future it could contain other Habbo item types.
• NFT credits release. In early 2022, Habbo released a digital currency for their ecosystem called NFT Credits. This is used for a vast variety of things within the ecosystem, and is the currency of Habbo X. You accrue NFT Credits for free by owning Avatars, Rooms or Portraits.
• NFT pets. In late 2022, NFT pets arrived in Habbo.
• NFT Shop launch. To provide holders of Avatars, Rooms or Portraits with excellent utility, we introduced a shop on our website that stocks regular, new and exclusive items to spend NFTC on.

Stage 2 — Habbo X Rooms & Alpha

The second stage focuses on Habbo X: a fully web3 version of Habbo. We believe in true ownership of in-game assets, and rewarding the most engaged and active players. Therefore we started to develop Habbo X.

The development of Habbo X is still on-going and it will continue for years to come. The first focus point of Habbo X has been rooms and the true ownership of those rooms. We want to give our room owners and builders tools they can use to create fun and engaging experiences as well as reward those builders for the content they are creating!

Even though most of the features for this stage have been released already, we will continue to work on some of these features in the coming months.

• Habbo X Alpha 1. In December 2022, we opened up the doors for the first ever alpha test in Habbo X.
• NFTC accumulation for rooms. In early 2023, we enabled NFTC accumulation for genesis Habbo X rooms.
• Habbo X room upgrading. In early 2023, we enabled room upgrading for genesis Habbo X rooms.
• Furni Factories. In mid 2023, the team added Furni Factories to genesis Habbo X rooms.
• Habbo X navigator. In mid 2023, the team added a brand new navigation system to Habbo X.
• Blueprints / sandbox mode. Early on in the project, we discussed a mode where you can freely build with the furni available in Habbo X and save your build as a “blueprint”, and sell that blueprint to others. This aims to give each and every player the opportunity to experiment with room building. Given that building the “blueprint” mode will be a huge task, we will most likely release a sandbox mode first that allows everyone to experiment with building, then later on we’ll add a blueprint mode that allows you to sell those builds to others.
• Wired 2.0. Habbo is famous for being one of the first true sandbox experiences launched in the early 2000s, and the functionality Wired brings has taken unleashing creativity to a new level.
• Modern client UX improvements. The Habbo team is constantly building out its newer, more modern client. All improvements made to the Modern client carry over to Habbo X.

Stage 3 — Habbo X Rewarding Mechanisms

The main focus of Habbo X rewarding mechanisms is to give players reasons to spend time in Habbo X. Room owners need to be compensated for their efforts to create engaging rooms and players will need to be compensated for spending time in Habbo X.

• Room owner rewards. We want to make room ownership an important part of the Habbo X experience, and we want to reward room owners in a variety of ways. NFTC accumulation and Furni Factories are the first steps towards this, but we’ll also add room owner achievements that will reward you with exclusive items. In the coming years we’ll also see what other ways we can reward the room owners, especially the players who are creating engaging experiences in Habbo X.
• NFTC gates. These items allow room owners to charge NFTC to enter specific parts of the room, and also to award winners of the game or activity they’re hosting in the room.
• Player progression. Progression is a core component of any game. It creates a core loop on top of which other features can be built. For Habbo X, the player level system will be the most important part of the player progression feature set we’ll work on. Player progression includes features that reward players (e.g. achievements) but its cornerstone will be the bigger updates we make to our collectibles system. In a nutshell, the more full collections you own, the higher your level will be. Therefore, most likely the main updates to Habbo X player progression will happen when we introduce Habbo Collectibles. And yes, this also means that the current levelling system we copied from Habbo will be replaced with this new level system in a future Habbo X update.
• Achievements. We’ll add more achievements and a new reward system for unlocking those achievements. Some of the current achievements Habbo X has, and that were copied over from Habbo like for like, will be removed because they are not applicable to Habbo X in the same way as they are in Habbo. As we start to emphasise Habbo Collectibles in the game, we will be introducing achievements as a means to obtain the new collectible items themselves.. Some will be geared towards new players, while other achievements will be hard to complete. There will also be some achievements that can only be completed by Habbo Avatar and Crafted Avatar owners, and some that will be exclusive for Habbo X room owners.

Stage 4 — Onboarding

We truly see NFTs and Habbo Collectibles as a win-win for both us, the team, and the players. True ownership of your hard earned, in-game assets — being able to sell them, trade them, donate them, whatever you want — should be something that every player wants. Thousands of Habbo Collectible items have been minted in the past 18 months, but the number of people that own them is still quite small.

The same goes for the number of people who visit Habbo X, even though this is in large part due to the fact that it’s in a closed alpha stage. During Stage 4, the team will focus on features that make it easier for everyone to participate in our ecosystem.

• Habbo Passport. This will be a new wallet solution that will make onboarding into our ecosystem (buying and trading our NFTs) much easier for our current and prospective user base. Ownership of your digital assets is a very important part of the Habbo Collectibles experience. But in order to own and use them, you need a place where you can actually store those assets. Therefore, making it as easy to create and use a wallet as possible is one of the keys to success for us.
• Habbo X Guest Pass. As we build Habbo X, we want to gradually allow more players in with a special guest pass. The main focus point of the Habbo X Guest Pass is for it to act as a tutorial for web3 newbies. We’ll use it to teach everyone how to get a wallet, how to mint items and what to do with those items in Habbo and Habbo X.
• Education and tutorials. Educating both current and prospective Habbo players about the ins and outs of web3 and NFTs is a big priority for our team. This will tie with the Habbo Passport and particularly with Habbo X Guest Pass.
• Habbo name minting. One feature we hope that will introduce players to Habbo X and to the NFT ecosystem is being able to mint your current Habbo username. I expect Habbos playing on the OG hotels to want to take advantage of this feature. However, this will be a pretty significant project, because we want to give the ability to reserve current Habbo usernames and implement logic for how you can claim the name you want. There will also likely be different waves of minting the names. Therefore, this feature will most likely not be released this year.

Stage 5 — Habbo Collectibles

NFTs, or even just the word itself, have an extremely bad image problem within the general public. This is one of the main reasons we’re looking to rebrand Habbo NFTs as Habbo Collectibles.

But, in addition to that, we have always seen our NFTs as collectible items. Habbo Collectibles will deepen our ecosystem by providing perks to those who collect our items. This will link strongly with player progression inside Habbo X, but it’ll also reward those who complete collections we release — for example the Vintaque line, or the Forged line. This will be a huge undertaking, so it’s impossible to estimate when all of these different features will be released.

• Website update / rebranding. We want to move away from the word “NFT” and other associated jargon wherever possible, at the same time as leaning into and emphasising the item collecting aspect of Habbo. It’s important to note that this only means that we will emphasise the collectible aspect in our marketing toward the web2 crowd. We are not moving away from web3 terminology entirely, and we’ll keep using the term “NFT” when marketing towards the web3 crowd.
• More furni collections. Our team will continue to release items for our holders in a number of different ways. We will also want to start releasing more collections that go well together.
• “Habbo Collector” score. We want to gamify the item collecting aspect of Habbo and provide unlocks and further items to those players that complete collections we release. This will be the core of the Habbo X progression system. Habbo Avatars, Habbo Portraits and Habbo X rooms will give more points than furni and other in-game items. In addition, if you own complete collections you will get a huge score bonus.
• Item minting from inventory. We want to bring utility to current Habbo players by giving them the option to mint items they own as NFTs on Immutable X. The team is currently working on the core components of this feature, but it’s extraordinarily complex and is taking a lot longer than we originally estimated. The reason for this is because we have to touch code in Habbo, Habbo X, and the blockchain. Our aim is to release the first iteration of this feature this year.
• New marketplace. We want to implement a brand new marketplace in Habbo and Habbo X that will allow players to buy items we release in-game. However, crypto wallets and the Unity client we use for Habbo X don’t work that well together, so this may be a more long term project as we wait for better support from Unity (they’re already making progress!) In the meantime, we’re looking for better browser-based options for a potential new marketplace. We’ve been talking with multiple potential partners already but so far we’ve failed to find any that are suitable for our needs.
• NFT outfits. We are looking into ways players could start creating outfits that you could sell to others. Basically, you would be able to utilise your clothing, Portraits and Avatars to design outfits. These outfits would be purchasable and usable as they are by other Habbo Avatar owners or players without any NFTs in both Habbo and X. The goal would be that the outfits would be the first thing the new player would purchase and use the outfits to edit their avatar looks. And having the outfits to be user generated is the way to go in my view. Please note, this feature is in very early stages of its design and may change or be even dropped out completely.

Stage 6 — Habbo X Rewards Update

After the main elements of Habbo Collectibles are out, we’ll look into ways we can improve the economy of Habbo X and the rewards we’ll give out there.

We want to release new ways to earn collectible items, such as mini-games (ideally even standalone mini-games) and we will take a hard look at the Habbo X economy and what is needed to make it thrive.

Economy update. Tokenomics has been a hot topic for over a year now for us. It is also an extremely hot topic in the US. For those who haven’t noticed, the SEC has classified tokens as securities which may have an impact for The Sandbox and Decentraland. Due to these reasons, I don’t see us introducing an ERC-20 token any time soon.

Therefore, we’re looking at three options what the Habbo X economy will look like:

1. Using NFTC as the currency.
2. Having a “crafting economy” where the in-game currency basically consists of crafting items. Kind of like how people used to trade items in the earliest stages of human history, before money was widely adopted.
3. Introducing a secondary currency that is similar to NFTC. This currency would be used in Habbo X to gain access to rooms and features, and to buy items. You can think about this more like a soft currency many games have, whereas NFTC is the hard currency. Having said that, the design of this currency is in early stages and may change.

We’ll want to see the introduction of achievement and progression systems impact Habbo X as a whole and we will make the decision about which three of the above options we should take after that. We will also see if and how we can update NFT credits — having a cap of total NFTC for example.

Then, in addition to the economy update, stage 6 contains:

• Mini games. My dream is to introduce standalone mini-games you can play on your mobile and earn Habbo Collectibles from. These games could also be playable in Habbo X. Currently, it is looking like that earliest this could be possible is late 2024 but we’re in the early stages of looking at this. In the meantime, the Wired updates that have been introduced to both Habbo and Habbo X can be used to create a wide variety of mini-games. Our first step is see if we can utilise this tech and bring out a first batch of mini-games that way.
• Wired 2.0 bundles and tutorials. The updates to Wired have been fantastic and we want all the room builders to be able to use these items. sirjonasxx is leading the Wired 2.0 project, and part of that is creating tutorials, achievements and “tasks’’ around them that aim to teach and reward everyone for learning how to use them. In addition, we will look at ways to reward players who are proficient with Wired and create fun and engaging experiences for others using the items.

Stage 7 — Habbo X Social Features

We see Habbo X and Habbo as social games. Therefore, having great social features is a must. Our aim for Stage 7 is to improve the current features to make it easier to communicate with others. We will also deepen the community features we have and focus more on community building and communication.

• User profiles. Profiles are a huge part of Habbo and we intend to build off this and improve them for Habbo X.
• (Community) direct messages. We’ll make it possible to DM other members of Communities you’re part of. Also, we want to introduce ways the community owners and managers can send messages directly to all members of their communities.
• Social media integrations. There are a number of different social media integrations we think would work well in Habbo X. E.g. YouTube video players, Spotify music players, and Twitter and Discord plugins.
• Community competitions. To deepen the community aspect, what is more fun than competing against other communities in mini-games and other in-game competitions? Winning rewards for your community of course. As we do this, we want to look into other community centric features such as community levels.
• Community chat. We’ll implement group chat for Communities in Habbo X.

Stage 8 — Future Stuff

We will keep adding features to Habbo X in the upcoming years. Some we’ve had to postpone from earlier roadmaps, after which we’ve moved them here. Then, some are random ideas we’ve had in the past year. Overall, features we have here are still important but we feel we need to have the other things released first to make Habbo X as complete a game as possible.

• Habbo X tutorial. To make onboarding into Habbo X as easy as possible, and to explain the unique features it has, we’ll implement a tutorial for new players. We will look at ways during the development of other features if we can onboard new players with those, but at some point we will need to do a big overhaul of the tutorial system and take a more detailed and comprehensive look at how we want to onboard new players.
• NFT galleries. We’ll make it possible to display NFTs you own in your rooms. This has been postponed due to the complexity of the feature and the assessment that this will not be a hugely impactful feature.
• NFT renting. We’ll make it possible to rent out your Habbo Avatars to others in exchange for NFT credits. If we find a good partner to implement the marketplace, this could be an add on to that but currently it is looking like this will have to be postponed.
• Avatar looks editing. Building on the trait editor, we’ll make it possible for owners of Crafted Avatars to edit the looks of their avatars. We may also experiment in-game looks changing of the genesis Habbo Avatars — at the very least discuss with the community whether you want to be able to edit the looks of your genesis avatar in-game or not.
• Badge update. With the introduction of NFT badges we felt we could make them more impactful in-game. There is lots of room to explore with animated badges and bigger badges. In Sulake’s sister game Hotel Hideaway there’s a “pin” system that could be used for Habbo X badges. We will see if there are any easy updates we can use to update the badge system for Habbo X as we want to make badge collection as fun as possible!

Note: we have a long list of additional features we left out of stage 8.

Long term vision

In this blog post I have gone through the steps we have both behind us and in front of us. Short term, we will move the Habbo X and the NFT ecosystem towards Habbo Collectibles. Essentially collecting items released in our ecosystem and using them in both Habbo and Habbo X. You can earn even more collectible items from Habbo X and as you complete collections, and by doing this you will level up and will earn prestige and exclusive Habbo Collectible items.

Long term, we see Habbo X as a place for adults where you can both socialise and collect. But even more importantly, we see Habbo X as a place where you can spend time engaging with content created by other players. We’ve taken our first steps to introduce user generated content with NFTC revenue share, and we want to do more of this in the future. We’ll also look into ways we can reward our room builders.

We’re very excited with the updates coming this year — new Wired items that will enable everyone to create new and exciting games, as well as the rebranded Habbo Collectibles ecosystem with new Habbo X achievements and collectible items.

Going forward, we will not release roadmaps but instead update the chart presented here. We will be giving progress updates and tell you if there are bigger changes with our plans. I hope you are as excited as we are for the future of Habbo and Habbo X!

- Muumiopappa