Measuring a game economy
We've always believed that the true source of excitement in
Habbo Hotel comes from its users. The
stuff we build into the product is fun yes, but what our players invent as they explore the
opportunities is truly something else! It never ceases to amaze us how imaginative experiences
people come up with using the different tools and help from their buddies. The way they combine
different things and come up with activities and behavioral patterns we did not anticipate, or even
dream of, is just astonishing!
Accordingly, one of our most important tools for identifying ways to improve Habbo Hotel is
to focus on what exactly our players are doing with features already there. Boy, there’s a lot to
look at…
Recently, we've developed several features related to a smoother working player-to-player
market for furni. As most Habbos know, furni trading is a popular activity, and while we've always
had features to enable trading, players have to try hard to participate in it. As all free markets,
also the Habbo secondary market has been difficult to succeed on, and only a few players have fully
mastered trading. Some of the most active players in fact collect market data in order to publish
it on their own sites to help the market work better - a big job, and we thank them for that!
As trading is so popular in Habbo, we wanted to make it more approachable and easier to
understand. Thus we developed the
Marketplace
where players can bid for different items. We also started publishing information about the value
of items exchanged there. However, as the original trading activity has a lot of fans as well, we
didn't want to ignore that either. Now, these two markets together are several times larger than
the sales of new virtual items from the Habbo furni catalog. On some days, furni changes hands over
two million times.
How could we then value this trading activity? Or as we've asked in one of our introductory
demo videos already a long time ago: is an empty pizza box really worth as much as a fireplace?
Since most trading doesn't happen against one common currency, this is not an easy question.
We decided to tackle it anyway, by analyzing each day two million trades and evaluating the value
of each of them based on the historic value of each item. We take those trades where buyer uses
only Habbo coins as a currency, which helps us determine the market value for a subset of all of
the traded items. This also helps us iterate over the rest of the trades to identify value for more
items, and we repeat the process until everything has a value. And of course, we then repeat this
process every day, in order to set a value for all items.
Some of this data is now being used inside Habbo to display price development on the
Marketplace. We're continuing to develop this information, in order to make it more accessible to
players, old and new, and help them develop their in-game activities further.
Oh and by the way, a fireplace is more than twice as valuable as an empty pizza box.
We are currently looking to hire a new research analyst into our User Insight team based in
Helsinki, Finland. The specific focus in the position is the statistical analysis of the user base,
both from collected metrics data as well as our continuous user surveys. If you are qualified and
interested, I recommend to take a look at our
job posting
and send in an application!
