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#SaveHabbo

Dear Habbo Developers & Sulake,

As many of us have witnessed recently, the Habbo2020 Beta launched across all hotels. Instead of positive reviews and reactions, the reception was overwhelmingly negative. The vast majority of the Habbo community is deeply disappointed with the poor performance, lack of features and functions, and the complete disregard of their thoughts and opinions.

The Habbo2020 Beta has proven to be detrimental for hotels of all different languages simply by prohibiting us from accessing some of the most basic daily functions we relied on. With Flash officially ending on December 31, you have less than a week to fix the thousands of bugs prior to launch which we are sure will not be accomplished.

Throughout the entire past year, the new Unity client has been in development with little to no information being given until the very final quarter of 2020. As the Beta phase began opening up, players began expressing their dissatisfaction with how bare and raw the game felt. Week after week, you began releasing more information which confirmed you chose to focus more on maximizing profits than building a client that focuses on the user’s experience. By choosing to focus on the mobile market, you have neglected the majority of users that play via PC.

This is completely unacceptable. The stance Habbo has taken towards these ridiculous and redundant changes is abhorrent and does not represent the game we’ve grown to love and appreciate over the years. We’re being introduced to the era of taxation and microtransactions instead of revolutionizing the Habbo experience to become the primary social hub on the internet, where kids and teens alike can hang out and make friends. Habbo has always been a social and trading game yet now its future legacy is being tarnished by poor decision making from individuals that do not understand Habbo or its community. It is clear by now that the Habbo2020 change is here to stay, and the current Flash hotel will become obsolete. This does not change the fact the new hotel needs a lot of necessary changes to become feasible to work with.

Outlined below are some incredibly poor decisions that will make or break Habbo as a game and brand. We call upon the developers and their management team to reconsider the decisions made so far and commit to a major form of compromise in the interest of Habbo’s health and longevity:

We are calling on you to implement and/or fix the following:

Group Badges: Groups badge limits are now determined based on each user and their level. Agencies, Fansites, Game Hosts, Builders, etc. all rely on group badges to be the identifying factor of their organizations, organizing room builds, maintaining team members in specific groups for long-term projects and more. This must be reverted.

Group Badges will now be forced to be renewed on a monthly basis as not every user that joins a badge will commit to raising their level. You are punishing group badge owners for the actions of others by setting a limit, preventing new users from joining. This also means you have taken Agencies, Builders and Game Hosts hostage by requiring them to create new groups very frequently and having all its members rejoin every badge. Such tedious and unprofessional practices must not reach the live game, lest the intentions behind this change backfires and renders group badges ineffective completely. This is important and must be reversed.

Room Moderation: Currently, only the room owner is capable of kicking, muting, or banning others. Large agencies rely on active rights on a daily basis to moderate their rooms. It will now become impossible when the room owner is offline. Keep in mind most rooms on Habbo do not have group badges connected to them. By forcing this change to moderation, you put rooms at risk for vandalism and trashing. Developers must restore the room rights functions to room settings without badges immediately as only the owner should be capable of distributing rights and managing bans. Room Rights holders must be able to kick, mute for 2mins/5mins/10mins and ban for 1hour/1day/Permanently.

Donation Cap: The current feature limits you at 9c with a 1c tax (a total of 10c). With concepts such as paying agency members, hosting competitions and game rooms, the limit must be raised. Coins are the primary currency of Habbo and with private trading unfinished, this amount is preposterous and only serves to maximize the amount of coins spent via tax.

Client Optimization: The current state of the Unity client is unplayable. The hotel is riddled with bugs that render the game non-functional, especially for users with low-end devices. The client must be tweaked and adjusted for all users without sacrificing the quality of gameplay to ensure an enjoyable gaming experience.

Tax System: Taxes on the Marketplace and the Vault are not feasible. Trading will no longer function properly when you attempt to perfect an imperfect economy. The Vault currently offers no benefits other than being a pay-to-play feature which takes your coins hostage should you go beyond the 500c limit. It does not offer any form of security such as a PIN system, nor does it give any benefit to the user. You must reconsider this approach before you destroy the economy of Habbo.

Account Security & 2FA: Instead of improving user security, you decided to discontinue the password reset service. There is no logical reason that you chose to do so when no single modern gaming company has made such a poor decision. Instead, you offer one-time login codes which are just as insecure when the password associated with the account is now outdated and prone to vulnerabilities. This change is an attempt to shift your responsibility to email providers to rely on account security from. 2FA is more cost effective, raises awareness for users and offers optimal security for Habbos. You must revise the security protocols of Habbo before launch as any breach will be catastrophic.

Room Limits & Doorbell: On other hotels such as .fr, a lot of their rooms are spread out among different accounts. Since users can no longer transfer their furniture between accounts whenever they desire, they are now forced to buy the same furniture repeatedly. Given the current room limit is at 100, it should be expanded to 200 to facilitate the needs of each hotel and its community.

Additionally, the choice to remove the doorbell is a poor one. Many users rely on this feature to allow selective entrance into rooms. Password-locking these rooms is not feasible as many rooms are used by specific users. By sharing a password, this means it would constantly have to be changed multiple times depending on room usage. It also means a password must be remembered for each room. Simply put: a tedious process that is not in the best interests of the community. These issues should be immediately reviewed and fixed.


In the end, our communities are not demanding the impossible. We are not asking to scrap an update after resources have been clearly dedicated to it. What we are asking is that you compromise and work with the community that inhabits Habbo. Players understand you have a roadmap and list of priorities, but your order of operation does not match with ours. The community will not stick around for unscheduled release dates for functions they’ve had for over 10 years. The community is demanding what they already had, nothing more or less. A timeline should be published with clear expectations for each update.

#SaveHabbo Shutdown

Despite our best efforts for the past few months, we have not yet been able to elicit a direction that takes what we consider to be a functional platform for all communities - including a satisfactory user experience. At every turn, compromise has been shot down without any justified reason or purpose. Instead, the focus of the FAQs published purely focus on telling users how to play Habbo while attempting to credit themselves as part of the solution by combating non-existent and fictional issues that allegedly plague the community.

As a result, all organizations signed below will be participating in a global shutdown which will begin on 03 JAN 21 at 11:59 PM UTC. In essence, this means that all parties that have signed this statement have agreed to protest the Habbo2020 update by suspending their operations and closing their rooms/headquarters to display what the game will look like when you stand by your unreasonable stance. We'd strongly encourage and recommend that all Habbos do NOT log into the hotel during the shutdown as well. Furthermore, we acknowledge the published statement by Global Manager “Alyx”, however it simply brushes over the issues we are protesting against by referring us to pointless and tone deaf statements made in a series of FAQs. These decisions will effectively destroy Habbo as we know it before there are any chances to fix high-priority issues and bugs. There should be no higher priority than the users.

Until then, room names have been changed to reflect our stand against the negative aspects of this update. Our hope by initiating this agency-wide shutdown is that it empowers you to take our concerns more seriously, while providing much needed solutions to mitigate current issues you chose to ignore and dismiss.


Check out #SaveHabbo on Twitter and follow @Puhekupla or our Discord to stay up-to-date. Read our statement in the comments below.

16 replies on “#SaveHabbo”

Puhekupla is known about having an opinion about stuff, we decided to take a different road this time.
We have been neutral about the new client since Sulake started with the closed beta a few months ago. I've posted some stuff on Twitter that Sulake could improve and our amazing team kept you up-to-date with the latest beta changes.

We agree with the statement above and think Sulake has to change a lot in order to keep Habbo Habbo. We'd like to keep you informed in 2021 (and the many years to come), but are really worried about the state of Habbo2020.

For Puhekupla this means we'll be (temporary) closing the site for the first time in [b]11[/b] years (except for server issues and maintenance).

What was Puhekupla doing at the time of the transition from Adobe Shockwave to Adobe Flash Player? Back then, you never heard such a critical sound as we hear today. How many features have been lost with this transition? How many have you seen back?

Remarkably, this sound only comes from a large fixed group of players who have long since reached adulthood and have clearly lost interest in what Habbo is today and what it is going to be. Only they do not want to acknowledge this because they have become accustomed to what Habbo is today.

What they don't understand is the target group Habbo focuses on and what it is developed for. It is designed to make money. It focuses on young players between the ages of 13 and 18. The gambling elements have been taken out in order to achieve a better classification in the mobile market. The Desktop UI of Habbo2020 has been designed with the mobile market in mind and has been derived from it. The focus has long since shifted away from desktop users.

Azerion owns most of the shares and may therefore determine what Habbo will be for the new generation. A new era has dawned in which Habbo is entering a new phase. Habbo2020 was built for this purpose, not to please the regular group of players, but to achieve objectives and to change the game to what the shareholders want to see.

Habbo has put forward enough arguments as to why, for example, the trade in furniture between players will not return for the time being. Do not expect it to come back either, as with Habbo2020 the focus is on guaranteeing safety and stopping the black market (trading goods in the real world). But also to prevent the theft of assets. The same goes for more features behind a payment wall to validate whether a user is real and therefore to be able to give more rewards.

These changes are necessary in order to be able to exercise more control over what Habbo is today and to ensure that it remains fair. People need to let go of what Habbo was for them and learn to accept change. Like the way all those players did it with the transition from Shockwave to Flash.

The movement we are looking at now, #SaveHabbo, is not going to change anything. On the contrary. In a few days, the Adobe Flash Player plug-in will be disabled in many browsers because it will no longer be able to guarantee security as it is not supported. There will be no compromise. Certainly not with a group of regular players who are too old to play and do not belong to the target group for which the new Habbo2020 was designed. Take it or leave it.

All of the features missing in the shockwave to flash transition were promised to be added later and we waited and waited and waited. Which 10 years later we now see was a lie all along. Which is why we know we must act now to salvage the mess Azerion is creating. Ask Johno, Wille, or Dom what they think of your plans. They know habbo better than every single person running the show at Azerion. Wake up corpo shill. This isn't going to go as planned for you no matter how much you try to justify it because at the end of the day you are just flat out wrong.

A lot of features have been renewed from Shockwave to Adobe Flash Player. Take examples from a Jukebox, the return of Snow Storm, Battle Ball and the Camera.

Developers who are hired are paid to build features that shareholders want to see. For example, a recycling function and a new system for collecting collection cards are already under construction. The fact that you have to pay for the use of these features does not detract from the fact that Habbo2020 is under construction. Developers therefore have little to say about this, only when, in their view, a feature can be improved or further developed.

Azerion has a long-term vision and has therefore stepped in to make this a reality. The new Habbo will carry this vision and that's where change comes in.

As far as I know, public games like Battle Ball and Snowstorm were transitioned into private ones. Trax disappeared and the machine is only able to play ONE song (the song that was set back in 2009), and Snowstorm was even added back in 2011, but it was a dead game at that point so they removed it.

I still have articles from 2011 (lol) where Sulake promised to bring Trax back. They allow predators on their platforms, while banning everyone even critical on Sulake, the vanished moderators etc.

tl;dr Keep sucking their bobba and spend your money on a game controlled by a company which is an expert in scamming their employees and having 1 star reviews on several websites. If you really think any of these changes are gonna stop the black market or fix any security issues you're extremely delusional because it literally takes minutes of research to know that this is not true. You sound like an actual azerion employee which is embarrassing as bobba but I can't blame you since you probably don't have anything else in your life like everyone else who is actually defending this MESS. Also there's no way that UI was designed by an UX designer who knows what they're doing since there are so many issues and wrong placements.

I wouldn't have minded if Habbo became a little bit like Hideaway but difference between those games is that you can earn so many free stuff in Hideaway while in Habbo you're immediately forced to spend your money to get credits and other stuff by unlocking your vault. They'll never be able to host falling furni, trade to get furni and do other things they loved to do so keep your bobba opinion about their target audience to yourself.

Noobs will never be able to host falling furni, trade to get furni and do other things they loved to do so keep your ### opinion about their target audience to yourself.*

"What you don't understand is the target group Habbo focuses on ... young players between the ages of 13 and 18."

Interesting, I was under the impression that 71% of users is over 19 years of age. Hmm....

In several interviews, the ratio of the number of users older than 18 years has been made clear (~70 - 71%). It is therefore clear that this group of players is not the most profitable. Younger players are much more influential and easier to persuade to buy.

Nevertheless, the current user base is taken into account, only that is not the main focus. It's about a next generation of gamers who will come into touch with Habbo. That's where the most can be gained.

When will some of you delusional addicts understand that adding taxes to literally every feature of the game is not going to attract a younger audience.

Sjoerd really found his/her way to this article, too. I don't believe it.
And you which comment I'm referring to.
Poor guy.

Even though it probably won't change a thing, it's nice to see the community and fansites working together like this.

I hate the direction they're going with the game, maybe we are not the target audience anymore (which is totally fine), but we are the reason the IP is still worth so much to this day. Habbo isn't a mobile game and it never will be, unless they start all over again with a hard reset, more mobile game-related features and are willing to destroy 20 years of content (and losing all the existing users in the process). In the end it will never work what they're planning to do, Habbo definitely needs improvement, innovation and a new direction, but what we're seeing right now is the wrong way.

I'm looking forward to see what they can come up with in the upcoming years and I truly hope they keep in mind that this game is driven by it's community. All the best Habbo. (HEART)

They have announced the shutdown of flash in 2016 or 2017 (i think), they had 3 full years to come up with a plan and rewrite the game and make it at least stable to use with the mandatory features including:

- Private chat
- Room Moderation
- Trading
- Better security

But instead it feels like they've started rewriting the client last minute, leaving the game with thousands of bugs making the game unstable to play on. [b]That there are more mobile apps doesn't mean Habbo should focus on mobile/tablets only! PC gaming is still a thing.[/b]

The new client is horrible, the speech bubbles are bigger than everything. The interface looks confusing. At least bring the old buttons back or place some tooltips.

[b]The fault is absolutely a NOT DONE feature. You basically threaten users to buy credits otherwise they cannot withdraw the credits in the fault.[/b] This shows that Habbo only focuses on one thing and it's disgusting. Years after years, people have been complaining, giving solutions and other good suggestions to improve the game, and now you're writing your own funeral.

I don't think Habbo can be saved anymore. They died a long time ago by removing the features that made Habbo unique.

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