The Next Web

Habbo likely to take over WoW as number one MMO

Written on June 30, 2008 – 12:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Ok, sorry for the abbreviations in the headline. Let me rephrase that: Sulake’s Habbo Hotel will probably take over World of Warcraft as the number one massive multiplayer online game. Yes, you’ve read that right. I know, I know, it’s like Pepsi becoming the most popular coke. But it’s most likely that it will happen. The Finnish game has logged its 100 millionth registered avatar and “attracts close to 10 million monthly visitors to its services worldwide”, reports Wagner James Au on GigaOm.

The last numbers WoW’s mother company, Blizzard Entertainment, has released date from January 22th. In an euphoric message, the Wow PR officers announced that the game had reached a “new milestone of 10 million subscribers”. Still quite a lot, but will the numbers remain high enough to keep Habbo away from the MMO throne?

Habbo Executive Vice President Teemu Huuhtanen told GigaOm that they’re expecting to reach the 10 million milestone in thirty days, thanks to a redesign, new content and teen celebrity avatars. The ‘hotel hangout for teens’ allegedly generates a huge amount of cash by selling virtual objects. It operates in 31 markets globally.

I hope you like that post!

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Blizzard, finland, Habbo Hotel, Massively multiplayer online game, MMO, online game, World of Warcraft

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eRepublik gets €550,000 to build a bigger world

Written on June 10, 2008 – 5:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Almost everybody sometimes secretly fantasizes of leading completely different life. Don’t you? The people behind eRepublik probably realized this when they were building their massive online multiplayer social strategy game.

Co-founder Alexis Bonte at Menora TechTalk 2008

Players can become journalists, politicians, soldiers, nurses, or whatnot, in different countries. Most of the fantasy societies are user-generated and players can either choose to play casually or for the money. Yet they have one thing in common, the time it takes them to play the game: 14 minutes a day.

The Madrid-based start-up is in a private beta since November 2007. Private is a very broad definition, as 395,000 users are testing the service.

Till today, the service took €200,000 in angel funding. But now they’ve closed another round and received €550,000 - mainly from French venture capital fund AGF Private Equity and a large group of business angels including the founders of Lastminute, Livra and Intellego. The co-founders Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru will use the money to expand the game.

Erepublik received a honorable mention at the Le Web Start-up Competition last December. I think that was absolutely correct, considering the impressive number of users and the stickiness of the game.

erepublik, investment, madrid, online game, spain

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