As of today, Habbo is a dual currency economy. Credits are bought and used to purchase persistent value, and you can earn Pixels by doing Achievements and just hanging around online. We’re piloting the change in UK, and if it’s working fine, the other countries will get it at some point in the future (as usual).

The user feedback is of course mixed, but given the ratio of positive vs negative comments, I think we’ll get pretty good overall rating in the final evaluation of the release.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s participated in the GDC “Free to Play, Pay for Stuff” round tables – I’m fairly sure this would not have happened without those sessions. And of course, Daniel James and Matt Mihaly for graciously sharing so much of what they’ve done with virtual economies.

Unfortunately I can’t spill all the beans on this but rest assured what’s out now is not the whole system. There’s still a lot to work on, and most importantly a lot of user feedback to read. It seems I’ll be giving a post mortem of sorts about this in GDC, where I hope I can share a lot more than this. :)