At this year’s GDC, Sulake lead designer Sulka Haro talked about plans to move their teen virtual world juggernaut Habbo more into the direction of gaming:

“Habbo has been trying to boost the game mechanics within its world while still maintaining its socially-oriented open-endedness. There’s a key reason behind the decision: in the highly competitive free-to-play social world space, user retention is key.” (Worlds in Motion)

Haro, who kept calling Habbo a “game-less game” in the past years, emphasized his point of view that Habbo is “most definitely not a game”. Still, Sulake seems to have realized (just as Gaia Online with their new MMORPG Zomg), that social worlds only take you so far — which seems to be a change of focus for Habbo (or a change to loose focus?). The take-away seems to boil down to:

-Users expect more from Habbo
-Game-mechanics like Achievements bridge that gap for newbies and create new scarce goods for power-users.
-Your users don’t easily understand new social tools so you better don’t listen to their opinion.

Aha… some more thoughts about this can be found at Adam Martin’s T-Machine.