Habbo X — a fully web3 Habbo Hotel

Habbo
17 min readApr 21, 2022

Gm, community! Muumiopappa here.

It’s time to talk about the BIG vision I have for Habbo NFTs: a fully web3 Habbo which will share many existing Habbo features, but should be considered as more of a brand new game than a new Habbo server. Habbo X will focus on NFTs, play-to-earn mechanics, and tokenomics.

This blog isn’t a full design document or a whitepaper. I am planning on releasing something along those lines later this year (check our current roadmap for more information about what we have planned in terms of Habbo NFTs).

This is more like an overview of the things we are working on and the general concepts we want to have in Habbo X. And remember, some of these are still just ideas and can be fine tuned, left out or rethought altogether. Also, you may notice that some of the ideas we have here have come directly from the community, so keep them coming!

Please let me know what you think and leave your feedback in our Discord server! Kaneljente has created a new channel for everyone to give feedback — it’s called #habbo-x-feedback. We’ll be monitoring it for feedback to respond to and questions to answer in a @HabboNFT Twitter Space on Friday April 22nd.

If you read just one thing in this blog, read this: Habbo has always been a place to socialise and create. In Habbo X, you’ll be rewarded for your contributions to the game and its community, whether that’s using new tools we provide to host wired furni games, or even just chatting to friends from other NFT projects and collections.

I want to make Habbo X one of the most popular places in the metaverse for the global NFT community to spend time in and interact with each other.

Key concepts in Habbo X, a “too long, didn’t read”:

  1. Accounts: your wallet will basically be your account. Your username can be your ENS/Nametag (but it doesn’t have to be). The hotel will be free-to-play but Habbo Avatar holders get better benefits than anyone else.
  2. Looks: by default, all avatars will look exactly the same. NFT clothes or Habbo Avatars will be needed if you want to customise your looks. In addition, we will see if we can give portrait holders access to the looks worn by their portrait. We are also looking to provide NFT collections that we collaborate with their own unique looks.
  3. NFT rooms: to cut a long story short: rooms WILL be NFTs. There will be five different sizes: small, standard, large, x-large, xx-large. The size indicates the maximum number of tiles in the room and the layouts that are available. All NFT rooms will be upgradeable to a larger version with what I’m calling ‘hotel currency’ for now (scroll down a bit to the ‘Economy’ section to find out what this term means and why I’ve used it). Each and every Habbo Avatar will come with its own room. So in essence, your Avatar will include two NFTs: the avatar and the room. Additionally, anyone who plays Habbo X will have access to a small room that will NOT be an NFT room. These will most likely be used for building practice or hosting very small numbers of other players.
  4. The default furni selection will be HUGE! It’ll include a lot of the furni we’ve released in Habbo over our 21 year history (we’ve released over 18,000 different items in that time). Overall, the availability of furni shouldn’t limit you from creating the things you want to create if you have the space to build it in.
  5. Play-to-earn functionality won’t be limited to staff-created rooms! Some furni will give you the ability to choose between distributing NFTs and hotel currency from your wallet as a reward for participating or winning a game you’ve built (and maybe even ERC-20 tokens you own). You’ll also be able to charge participants a fee in hotel currency for playing the game.
  6. We’ll also add mini games like SnowStorm. You’ll be able to win hotel currency and NFTs by doing well in these mini games.
  7. There will be additional ways to earn hotel currency other than just in games. The owners of the most popular and most visited NFT rooms, for example, will be rewarded too. The idea is that we want to reward the most active communities and players.
  8. Blueprints: are you a god tier Habbo room builder or a wired furni expert? You’ll be able to build a blueprint, or a design of a room that you can sell to others for hotel currency. Build a really cool wired game and sell the blueprints to NFT room owners so they can run cool games. You’ll earn hotel currency from selling the blueprint, but maybe could also get a cut from the usage of the blueprint as well.
  9. Habbo Avatar holders will earn roughly 15x more rewards than free-to-play players do. Collab collection holders will earn somewhere around 5x the rewards that free-to-play players earn. Note that we are still balancing the economy so the final multipliers are to be determined. The key takeaway here is that Habbo Avatars will be the top tier earners in Habbo X!
  10. Social media integrations: we want to add functionality that will give you a Twitter bot in your NFT project’s private room to say certain account’s tweets out loud — “Habbo Avatar #313 was sold for 3.13ETH”, for example. There are other things we could do in this area, I’m open to suggestions!
  11. Avatar renting: owning an avatar may be too expensive for some, so we want to build a system in which you can rent yourself an avatar and enjoy the benefits. The person renting the avatar would get some hotel currency for their trouble. Maybe even a cut from the earnings.

That’s a lot already. I know I’m leaving out a lot of things here like a potential in-game NFT marketplace, and there are still a lot of design details to be fleshed out. At this stage, I wanted to focus on the most important features and differences when compared to the current Habbo.

So that’s the “too long, didn’t read” version. Below is further information for those who want to understand what all of this means in a bit more detail. Grab a coffee and let’s dig in.

Economy

We currently have NFT credits and NFT credit furni. We are looking into ERC-20 tokens as well. However, as we do not know yet what the actual currency in Habbo X will be, I’ll be referring to it in this blog as hotel currency.

Indeed, I’ve actually used the term above. Regardless of what the currency will be, it should be tradable outside of Habbo X.

We haven’t confirmed what the main currency will be in Habbo X, but it’s likely NFT credits will play a huge part

Accounts

First of all, Habbo X will be free-to-play: anyone with a Metamask wallet can join. We will probably start with a closed alpha and then a closed beta where only Habbo Avatar owners and maybe some NFT owners from specified ‘collab’ collections can join. But eventually we want to allow anyone to visit Habbo X. As each account is tied to a wallet you will have to own a wallet in order to play. As pretty much all wallets require you to be 18+ old, we will have the same age restriction.

You’ll be able to choose any name you wish but we will use the Discord-style method of adding #numbers after the avatar name. If you want to have a “premium” avatar name, we will allow ENS and Nametag names to be used as well. We will highlight these names one way or another. Twitter-style check marks or names highlighted with a different colour are a couple of options we have been discussing for the premium names.

Avatar looks

Each free-to-play player will have the same look. However, there are a few ways you can alter your looks from the basic, free-to-play look:

  1. Owning a Habbo Avatar.
  2. Owning NFT clothing.
  3. Owning an NFT from collections that we collaborate with.

Collab NFT owners will in some cases be given unique looks related to the NFT collection, and those players can choose to wear these looks. In addition, we aim to give Habbo Portrait holders access to the looks their portrait has.

NFT rooms and the Habbo X room system

This is something I’ve seen people discussing a lot in our Discord server: whether the rooms should be NFTs or not. I want to start by saying that we are still balancing this and thinking about how it would work but, overall, yes: rooms in Habbo X will be NFTs. For the most part, anyway. This will combine well with the play-to-earn features we are looking into at the moment.

We feel like each and every Habbo Avatar should have its own upgradeable room. Therefore, Habbo Avatar NFTs will include a fully functional room once we launch Habbo X. In other words, by owning an avatar you actually own two NFTs: the avatar and the room. This also means that if you were to sell your avatar, the new owner would then own the accompanying room (but none of the NFTs you’d placed in the room, if you’d placed any).

We also want every single player to be able to have access to room building to see what it is like — and it is good to have a place where you can use your NFT furni. Therefore, we will give every player a small room that is NOT an NFT. This ‘demo’ room will be very limited: concurrent visitors will likely be capped at just one, for example.

The rooms will come in five sizes: small, standard, large, X-large, and XX-large. The size indicates how many tiles there will be in the room and which layouts can be used. The rooms will be upgradable: you’ll be able to use hotel currency to upgrade your standard room to a large one, for example. This upgrade will be stored in the metadata and if you sell your avatar or the room NFT, the new owner gets the upgraded version of the room. Genesis collection avatars will get standard and Master Genesis collection avatars will get a large room. The “demo” room free-to-play players get will not be upgradable.

We will also sell limited numbers of these different sized rooms — both with NFT credits and Ethereum. These rooms will be NFTs that you can sell, transfer or purchase from the aftermarket. If you don’t want to bother upgrading your room, the easiest way is to just buy a XX-large room. We have not yet decided the total number of rooms that will be released.

The size of an NFT room indicates how many tiles there will be in the room and which layouts can be used.

The economy in Habbo X will not revolve around microtransactions and restricting access to certain items. We want to let you build all types of cool rooms, and this means we want to make the selection of available furni HUGE. We don’t want you to be limited by what items are available; we’ll start with wired furni but also include lots of cool items from all stages of Habbo’s rich history. However, we will leave out the rarest Habbo items from the item pool.

In addition to these private rooms we will also have public rooms and collab rooms. In public rooms you can interact with others. Some public rooms will host games while others will be purely social areas. Collab rooms will either be closed or open, depending on the desires of the NFT project that owns them, and they’ll be a perfect place for owners of each individual NFT collection to mingle with each other.

Blueprints

What if you own an NFT room but are new to Habbo and have no idea how to create fun and engaging games in Habbo using wired furni? Or you have tons of cool ideas for an interactive experience, but no idea how to implement them? Don’t worry, you’ll be able to buy a blueprint that essentially creates the room for you!

We will add a “sandbox mode” for everyone where you can create any kind of room you want — with any layout, any size and with any furni you want. Blueprints will also support the inclusion of NFT furni, but if the person using the blueprint doesn’t own the NFT furni, the space it occupied will be left empty in the actual room.

So, literally anyone will be able to create a cool room, save it as a blueprint and then put the blueprint up for sale. The seller will be able to choose the price (in hotel currency) and how many can be sold. As we want the creator to be able to get the maximum value out of the blueprint, we will most likely not mint it but instead offer it as an in-game item. We’d do it like this because otherwise it would be too easy to buy a blueprint, use it and sell it immediately as we cannot tie the room designs to blueprint ownership.

Wired furni are special, programmable items that can automate many different things in Habbo. They’re used to create fun and engaging games inside Habbo.

We will take a 5% cut from the blueprint sale but the rest of the hotel currency will go to the blueprint creator. In addition, we want the blueprint’s creator to earn 2% commission from the room owner when the room owner earns from the room that uses the blueprint, assuming we are able to clear the technical hurdles associated with this.

This will be a major feature as we will need to implement a ‘blueprint marketplace’ where other players can search for blueprints based on their tags, description, image and even go and test it. In addition, we will need to implement new data structures and game logic which makes this probably the most complex new feature we are looking to add. Therefore, it is highly likely that this feature will be introduced later.

Play-to-earn in Habbo X

Play-to-earn is the hottest topic in gaming at the moment. The goal is that we will implement a play and earn system — the key difference is that you have fun by spending time in Habbo and you earn while doing that!

We are considering a multitude of different ways you can earn both hotel currency and NFTs. However, one significant issue we have in Habbo is botting: if the earning mechanics can be botted, they will be. Tying earning to wallet ownership isn’t enough because anyone can create thousands of wallets. Therefore, we will tie it to NFT ownership.

My current thinking about the different tiers we will have in Habbo X is along these lines:

  1. Habbo Avatar owners will earn 15x rewards.
  2. Collab NFT owners will earn 5x rewards.
  3. Free-to-play players will earn 1x rewards.

Basically what this means is that if the reward for winning a competition is 10 hotel currency, when a Habbo Avatar owner wins they get 150, when a Metakey owner wins they get 50, and when a free-to-play player wins, they get 10.

Habbo Avatar owners will earn the most hotel currency and NFTs from play to earn activities in Habbo X.

PLEASE NOTE: we haven’t balanced the economy yet so the multipliers shown here aim to only demonstrate the difference between the various groups. The key here is that the Avatar owners will have the highest multiplier. In addition, if we feel like botting the free-to-play rewards becomes too easy, we may have to remove them completely. In addition, we will be looking to cap the daily gains for each of these reward categories to ensure the economy cannot be broken.

Earning with owned rooms

This is where things get interesting. Do you want to build a fun play-to-earn game yourself using your room? Well, you can! We aim to create or update furni with functionality that allows them to drop NFTs, ERC-20 tokens, NFT credits and hotel currency. We’ll need to have some new logic built into these furni so they drop the blockchain items the room creator wants them to drop.

Why would you want to give your hard earned NFTs, credits and currency as a reward? Because room owners will be able to charge a fee (in hotel currency) from players who want to enter the room or play games in the room.

We plan to add wired furni that will allow you to charge a fee for Habbo X players to play your games.

Room owners will also be able to make their rooms free and have no cost associated with it. We want to give monthly rewards based on player activity in NFT rooms. We will need to find a metric that rewards the room owners reliably and fairly.

In addition, we want to give new NFT projects a chance to create games where they can whitelist the winners. The idea is that we will collect the wallet addresses on their behalf from the winners of the competition. The idea here is to encourage new projects that haven’t yet dropped their NFTs to join Habbo and have them create games that are used for whitelisting members of their communities.

The vision is to provide the tools in Habbo X that NFT projects are currently using on Discord to engage their community — raffles, whitelisting, communications, and so on. And instead of being inside their own bubbles, i.e., Discord servers, you can interact with people from all the different projects when you visit the public areas.

Earning by playing Habbo mini games

Games are very popular in Habbo. This applies to both user-generated games and official Sulake-made mini games (Snowstorm, for example). If you don’t own any rooms, you’ll be able to earn rewards by participating in these games and doing well in them.

Earn by spending time in Habbo X / daily tasks

We want to give some currency for simply hanging out in Habbo. However, we need to see if we can do this without worrying about bots. Ideally, most earnings would come from playing games but in addition to that we will create a daily task system that will reward player activity as well. However, we need to find activities that are not easily botted but still something you can accomplish through the normal daily activities. We will most likely have to cap daily earnings from this.

Avatar renting

Habbo Avatar owners will earn passive income by renting their avatars. The basic idea is that you’ll be able to list your avatar as available for rent, set the rental price and time, and others will then be able to rent it out for their own use. The rent will be paid in hotel currency. This is like staking: you won’t be able to use your avatar when it is listed or rented.

The player renting the avatar will be able to earn 90% of the usual amount of hotel currency in Habbo. The actual owner will earn the rest of them (10%). All NFTs that are earned while playing will be given to the person renting the avatar.

Collab-based play-to-earn

Ideally, our collab partners would bring their own play-to-earn games to Habbo. What we want for the future of Habbo X is for projects to include something along the lines of “Play-to-earn in Habbo!” in their roadmaps. We could even go as far as creating fun competitions between different collections: an NFT Olympics where you need to own an NFT from a specific collection to enter. A friendly MAYC vs. BAYC competition, even. The goal is that collabs can assign their own ERC-20 tokens as rewards as well: if Uncool Cats are looking how to utilize their $SOUR tokens — they could create a play-to-earn game in Habbo!

It’s possible that we cannot give tokens from other projects as rewards due to legal reasons and regulations, but what we could do is provide a collab ←→ Habbo bridge with NFTs, similar to what we did with NFT credits and NFT credit furni. Let’s say the reward from a theoretical play-to-earn game from another project would be their $TOKEN tokens. We could drop “credit token” NFTs to the winners that they could then burn / swap for actual $TOKEN tokens outside of the Habbo NFT ecosystem.

These are, again, mainly ideas but I wanted to illustrate the possibilities we can offer and how vast the ecosystem we are building here is. Many of these ideas will take time to implement so don’t expect them to be in the alpha or beta versions.

Other ways to earn

We will look for additional types of play-to-earn mechanics as well. If you have ideas, please let us know in our Discord server. We have a brand new channel for you to feed back there called #habbo-x-feedback.

Social media integrations

Given that we want Habbo to become the main place where NFT projects spend their time, we want to integrate integral social media features NFT projects are using to engage with their community. This will include features seen on Discord and Twitter. Adding Twitter integrations will be interesting, e.g., a furni that can be linked to a Twitter account and that reads out the tweets as the Twitter account posts them.

For example, a @HabboNFT account that reads out the tweets in the room, a sales bot account that shouts out each sale, and so on. This could be furni designed specifically for this purpose. We actually already have a furni in Habbo that shouts out random bits of text, so this could be relatively easily repurposed.

Discord is another important tool. Therefore, a notice board for Discord announcements would be useful at least.

It’d be pretty easy for us to repurpose the existing chatterbox furni type as an in-game Twitter bot.

Habbo integrations

Some criticism I have seen has been that we are focusing too much on current Habbo. What many fail to realise is that we are laying the groundwork for Habbo X while doing so. It is very important to do all the NFT item integrations to Habbo as that will enable everything that is earned in Habbo X to be used in Habbo as well.

What this means is that there will be considerably more people who can access and use these items, especially when we have introduced an in-game NFT marketplace to both Habbo X and Habbo.

Wen alpha?

As you can see, our plans are extraordinarily ambitious. We aren’t copy and pasting Habbo. We are blowing up lots of existing things and redoing them. Our goal is to become the main metaworld in the metaverse. As you may have noticed, we aren’t very good with timetables and estimates. Especially with a project this large that aims to refactor lots of key components of a 21 year old platform, we do not want to give any concrete estimates at the moment.

We are committed to delivering Habbo X and we’ve already laid the groundwork for it with the first couple of integrations and experience with NFT furni. We have hired lots of people to work on this project and we will keep hiring as we move forward.

As for the Alpha 1 release, the current thinking is that we will limit the access to Habbo Avatar owners only. For Alpha 2, we will add Habbo Portrait owners and probably a collaboration project or two. After that, we are looking at either Alpha 3 or Beta release where we add more collaboration projects. Finally, with the V1.0 release we will open the gates and let everyone play Habbo X.

Those of you who read this all the way through, thank you! Remember to leave us feedback whether you like these plans or not! And if you have ideas on how to improve or even have ideas for new features, let us know!

Head on over to our Discord server and leave your comments, feedback and ideas in #habbo-x-feedback!

-Muumiopappa

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