Habbo Hotel: Chinese Market Too Challenging to Be Worthwhile "Habbo Hotel closed its Chinese portal on August 24. There has been some speculation that the departure of the platform, which only effectively launched this spring, was due to the lack of Shockwave penetration in China, but Sulake, the parent corporation behind Habbo, says that wasn't the case. "There's quite many reasons why we closed down Habbo in China (for the time being). Yes, we had some technical challenges with Shockwave, but that was not an obstacle for us. This was mainly a business decision," Communications Director Juhani Lassila told VirtualWorldsNews.com. This message appeared on the Habbo Chinese test site (Habbo.cn is simply down): Dear visitors: unfortunately we have some bad news for you: since August 24, 2007 Habbo.cn has been closed at least temporarily, and possibly for a long time. :( Our Habbo Staff is currently working hard to find a way to continue the service in the future - you will be informed about the situation as soon as we know. We are really sorry about this. Meanwhile you can choose to visit other Habbo services all over the world. This is the official statement from Lassila: "Sulake Corporation, the company behind one of the world’s largest virtual world’s for teenagers, has decided to close down its online community services in China for the time being. Habbo China was initially launched in August 2006, but due to partner & technical issues the effective launch was postponed until Spring 2007. The challenging Chinese market and high operational costs led to the decision of closing the service for now. Habbo customers in China are redirected to other Habbo communities." Habbo has currently local services in 31 countries on five continents and continues to grow to new areas. With its 7 million monthly unique visitors and over 78 million created avatars, Habbo is one of the largest virtual worlds and social networking services for teens. Shockwave penetration might have been an issue in attracting users, but so could the plethora of other simple, light-weight social applications coming out of China and Southeast Asia, or just QQ's overwhelming popularity."
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