Criticism for Habbo Hotel | 03/April/2026

Hi, 2001 player who still checks in from time to time here. I have some feedback that I think is valuable, but it's a little TL;DR for the in-game poll, so I thought I'd just post it here. I've tried my best to break it into a few sections as a list, but it might get a little messy and long-winded. Would love to hear what you think of some of my thoughts! Apologies for the length, but I didn't want to miss anything I thought was important.

- One of the biggest differences compared to years ago is that staff barely seem present in the game anymore, and quests are boring and unengaging. Back when I joined and up until the early 2010's, staff actually hosted games, turned up at events, spoke to people, and felt like part of the wider community instead of people operating behind a wall. Quests now are mostly just the same thing over and over: Walk through a room, click a few things from a checklist on HabboQuests, get your 1000th badge of the week, leave, and go back to idling somewhere for 6 hours and chatting to your friends on Discord. Wired has so much potential for events, and I get that automating them is really attractive as you can just set-and-forget them, but it makes the game feel soulless and sort of zombified. Random time-limited events that are physically hosted by staff where you can win unique stuff would be so much funner and it'd encourage people to be online and active to catch something happening.

- Another issue that people talk about constantly, whether staff want to acknowledge it or not, is favouritism. The few times staff do interact with the community, it often looks completely nepotistic. I'm not naming names, but there are obvious examples where certain users get treated very differently depending on who they know, how wealthy they are in-game, or how well connected they are to certain members of staff.

Support is already piss-poor for regular users, especially if you're dealing with hacked accounts or trying to recover anything important, but then you watch other people get special treatment that ordinary players would never get and it just feels insulting. For example, there are countless *known* famous hacked accounts floating around that staff not only refuse to deal with, but actively engage with in some cases because their friends happen to now own them (looking at you, hacked Hobba accounts!) Meanwhile, if you say the wrong thing in a room you lose all of your shit and support is totally impossible to deal with.

It's like there's a caste system, almost. Some users get away with behaviour that would absolutely get other people permanently banned but because they sit close enough to staff socially, they are untouchable. Outside of hacking inactive accounts, a lot of the behaviour from these circles is genuinely awful, and everyone who isn't a certain member of staff can see they operate like protected groups of bullies.

- On the subject of staff, a lot of your team need to get better at taking criticism without treating it like a personal attack on socialmedia - It isn't your personal project, it's a job to you and a product that people pay for. Every major unpopular decision seems to follow the same pattern. Players object loudly, nothing meaningful gets acknowledged, and eventually everyone is expected to accept it and if they don't like it? Tough shit. This needs to stop, and certain staff members should honestly just keep away from Discord and Twitter. Hire an actual community engagement team who have people skills.

For a few examples: NFTs were massively unpopular with most of the playerbase, the new client was massively unpopular, and years ago, removing things like Trax and games were massively unpopular too. The issue isn't that every decision has critics (that's normal) it's that criticism is constantly met with silence or with this strange "we know better than you" attitude, as if people complaining about something they spend money on are just being difficult instead of pointing out obvious problems that more often than not just stem from short-sighted greed that harms the long-term viability of the game. (looking at you, vaults and tax!)

- A mass unban would serve to breathe new life back into the game, and this is coming from someone who wouldn't even benefit from it. I suggest this could be done by unbanning any account that has been banned for more than 5 years (regardless of reason). Many people have rare furniture and old accounts locked up because they scammed someone in FF when they were 13 over a decade ago or called someone a nasty name when they were blocking the Lido back in 2006. This would breathe a lot of life back into the economy, bring back a lot of old players, and you could make a huge event out of it. Call it the "Great Redemption" event or something. Anyone caught reoffending can easily be rebanned, so I don't see what the issue would be here. It should have been done years ago.

- Stay away from age verification. Habbo has a long history of serious user-data breaches, and trust in your company and product is immensely low in this regard. People I know who have played this game for 20+ years would sooner delete their account than give you their ID. If someone is in an ID-gated country? Geoblock that country. They can access your service via a VPN if they want to play it badly enough. This is brand-suicide, and a game like Habbo won't survive it. Much bigger sites than Habbo are failing as a result of these Orwellian restrictions.

- There's an obvious untapped market for limited merch runs: books, shirts, posters, collectibles, things that actually feel worth owning and putting on your bookshelf or whatever. If you wanted to make it work even better, do limited IRL merch runs that give you the same item in-game that you own IRL. If you want to be extra fancy about it, give them LTD-style numbers (both the physical and digital item) and people will go batshit for them.

I own a fair bit of really old physical Habbo merch (namely the Just Another Day book), and people offer me insane amounts of money for it. Just do a limited run printing of them in a different coloured cover to preserve the value of the older ones for collectors and sell them, for Christ sake! It's free money!

- So now onto my controversial one: The economy itself also badly needs rethinking, especially around building tools.

If Habbo wants to keep calling itself a sandbox game, then creative tools can no longer stay held behind a paywall. Room size limits should be unlocked for everyone, unlimited Builders Club should just be standard, all Wired should be freely available to every player. Sounds nuts? Hear me out on this.

A sandbox game only works if people can immediately create things without running into paywalls every five minutes. Back in the day, Sulake had another product called Lumisota (which later inspired SnowStorm!) that failed for this exact same reason. In Lumisota, core gameplay features that were kinda required to be competitive/win were paywalled, and it pissed people off enough that it effectively killed it. (See timestamp for more info: https://youtu.be/khDz0TORc2Y?t=336) I very much view the current economic model/pathway to creativity to be on a similar level to this, but it's a cancer killing the game at a much slower rate.

To me, the obvious long-term model for Sulake should be to lean fully into what people actually value now: LTD's, other rares and clothing/cosmetic items. You could even add new features to take advantage of this. Maybe bringing back Habbo Homepages that can be customised would be a good move (host HOTW again! Engagement!) Sell page stickers and other stuff to decorate your page with. That's where the money is. Let people build freely, then sell them extras that don't impact core gameplay that promote user retention.

Now, don't get me wrong, I know that at first people would complain (because Habbo players complain about everything), but once people have unrestricted creative tools, I think that most would realise pretty quickly that the benefits outweigh the cons. Normal furniture is so worthless/unimpressive these days anyway, Habbo wealth isn't really measured that way anymore and it hasn't been for over a decade at this point. As the system currently stands, it needlessly gatekeeps people out of building and I can't imagine that Sulake even make much money out of regular catalogue furni sales anymore. Most of it is concentrated on the marketplace and in shops. Retros have made a very similar business model work with things like VIP memberships and free access to furniture, so I don't see why Sulake are sleeping on this.

- Finally, there also needs to be more thought put into preserving the history of the hotel, because for a game that relies so heavily on nostalgia, Sulake have seemed SUPER keen to nuke every single old account for no real benefit. Countless historically significant accounts have been deleted without care over the years, and with them went old rooms, recognisable names, and pieces of the hotel that actually mattered to people who remember that era. It feels like a sort of spit in the face to everything Habbo's built when you delete a room that used to be visited by thousands of people on a regular basis. As an old user, I get asked constantly to take people on tours of old rooms, and I have to tell people that there's almost bugger-all left from when I was active because you guys seem dead-set on wiping every single inactive account out.

I don't know why this wasn't dealt with in a manner similar to the merge if freeing up names is the main issue. Let's say that "test" is a super famous oldschool player who's been inactive for 5 - 10 years, why is it that "test" cannot be name-changed to "test#" or "test$" for example? We know that this can be done when the right person wants it to happen, because Macklebee manually changed the name of Odin to Odin^ before it was inactivity-wiped so he could have it for his personal account, lol. (Should have changed it to Odin$ by the way! It was a USA account, not an Aussie one! Cheeky!)

I know that this may seem like a huge wall of negativity, but I have a lot of experience in this space myself and I know Habbo *very* well. I have a lot of love for the community and an immense amount of nostalgia for the game itself and I do not want to see it die-off. I don't think that it's irreversibly cooked or anything, but the key to Habbo's success is not in a 25 year old business model that ceased being relevant in 2010.

Want to contact me? My email is in the navigator of this website.