Building a New Habbo

2013 · REBUILDING After the turbulence of 2012, Habbo entered 2013 looking for a fresh start. The previous year had brought the Great Mute, major criticism of the new direction and significant changes to the way the community was moderated. Now Sulake began putting much more emphasis on listening to players, improving the client and giving room builders more freedom. One of the biggest changes was a major overhaul of the Habbo client interface. The new design was developed partly in response to user feedback and gradually introduced during the year. The familiar navigation and interface were reorganised, giving the hotel a cleaner and more modern appearance while retaining the familiar isometric rooms and pixel-art furniture that remained at the heart of Habbo. Habbo's own retrospective later described the client overhaul as one of the major developments of 2013. For builders, however, the most important development came at the end of the year. 🧱 Builders Club On 4 December 2013, Habbo officially launched Builders Club. The idea came from a simple problem: dedicated room builders often needed enormous amounts of furniture just to construct ambitious rooms. Buying every individual piece from the catalogue could make large-scale building expensive and frustrating. Builders Club changed that by giving members access to a huge Builders Club Warehouse, allowing them to borrow furniture and place it directly into their rooms without owning each individual item. The system was developed with feedback from Room Builders Inc., a group of experienced users who helped Habbo create rooms for official events. It was a significant change in the relationship between furniture and creativity. Furniture was no longer only something to collect. It was becoming a building material. And that is a perfect milestone for Habbopix, because it represents a change that had been developing for years: from collecting individual objects toward using Habbo's enormous furniture library as a creative toolkit. 🎵 Habbo Palooza 2013 also saw the first Habbo Palooza, a virtual music festival combining games, competitions, player-organised events and celebrity appearances. The festival was partly organised with a group of selected Habbo users acting as event planners, giving players a more direct role in creating the event itself. The first festival included appearances from musicians such as Room 94, while players competed to build stages and event spaces. It was another example of Habbo increasingly mixing official content with user-created creativity. The year was also packed with furniture releases. According to Habbo's own 2013 retrospective, 549 new pieces of furniture and 922 new badges were created during the year, bringing the total number of badges beyond 8,000. Meanwhile, the Habbo Club was brought back after VIP had been introduced in 2010, with new rewards and furniture accompanying the return. The end of the year also brought a new generation of snowy furniture and, appropriately for a year focused on creativity, the launch of Builders Club just before Christmas. By the end of 2013, Habbo was beginning to find a new balance. The hotel was no longer trying to recreate the Habbo of 2005 — and it couldn't. The technology, interface and community had changed too much. Instead, Sulake was building a new version of Habbo around the same fundamental idea: give people a pixelated world, give them furniture, and let them create something of their own. 2013 was the year Habbo started putting the tools back into the hands of its builders.