Rumors of Sulake cost-cutting

[jasey]

Having reading a number of things I think we may find that the .com hotel is pretty much in safe hands and the other hotels are the ones who will be having changes which may also include closure. Not just of the local office of the hotel but the actual hotel itself, who knows. We will find out soon though!

I play Habbo France and I am worried about the future. We are one of the bigger Hotels, though. I think they'll close the smaller European Hotels first. We reach about 10,000 users online at the daily peak on Habbo France which is about the same as English Habbo if I remember correctly. I know there are bigger Euro Hotels, though, like Habbo Spain.

[MKR&*42]

I play Habbo France and I am worried about the future. We are one of the bigger Hotels, though. I think they'll close the smaller European Hotels first. We reach about 10,000 users online at the daily peak on Habbo France which is about the same as English Habbo if I remember correctly. I know there are bigger Euro Hotels, though, like Habbo Spain.

Yesss, you are about the same as .com - The top 4 hotels are .pt (Portugese), .es (Spanish), .com (English) and .fr (France). I'm quite surprised there are a lot of French Habbo users tbqh.

[jasey]

Yesss, you are about the same as .com - The top 4 hotels are .pt (Portugese), .es (Spanish), .com (English) and .fr (France). I'm quite surprised there are a lot of French Habbo users tbqh.

It's a flourishing community. It makes me very proud to be one of the bigger Hotels.

[xxMATTGxx]

Taken from the Habbo facebook page:

Nothing will happen tomorrow, we're just collecting questions we see around on forums and fansites, creating an FAQ so that we can answer as many questions as possible.. but for now, we wanted to make sure you all know that no one is being merged or closed down.

The article will be up tomorrow after everyone involved has had a chance to look it over and add their comments - at the moment, because of the time zones, we are not able to get everyone's input. But please rest assured that we are not being merged.

Staff from all over were affected, but no Hotels will be merged or closed, regardless of who are now gone.

You can write your questions here: http://www.habbo.com/groups/296747/i...0953/id/page/1 -- we will be looking through it tomorrow morning.

[mieite]

You guys do realize, that the shutdown hours at hotels like .fi stem from laws and PR, not moderation costs? As an example back in the day in Finland there was a storm in a teacup kinda situation where Habbo (being the first service like this targeted for teens) was blamed for causing children to be wake through the night which lead to the PR decision of closing the service down for the night to make nice with the accusing parents.

Merging the rest of the hotels makes no sense. They are already paying the server costs and those don't go away with merging.. unless the hotels run out of users because of it. They wouldn't save anything with merging now especially since the local offices are already going to be closed. They still need to do moderation for those languages, so merging gives no savings at all. Merging .COM and .DE made sense because they were the only languages that were served in multiple hotels and they could actually save in staff and moderation costs.

[Aaron]

I don't think they can introduce closing times for .com as we have different time zones and therefore are on at different times. So some people will be on in the middle of the night.. somewhere...

Oh yes, good point. I guess that's useful to us then.

[Zak]

As if Sulake don't make enough money as it is. Greedy heartless corporation, yet people still play their game. At least Jagex care for their users hence why I *got rid of* a lot of my spare furni...

Same with where I work though too, always looking to cut costs, they offer my manager £20,000 a year before deductions, that's a ******* insult if you ask me.

[Chippiewill]

25% reduction in staff? 99% reduction in competent moderators (H)

[GommeInc]

They've been cost cutting for years, ever since they tried to monopolise but have failed in the process. Personally, I wouldn't feel sad if they shut up shop - their dreadful decision making skills, lack of community support and lack of drive to run the business has condemned Sulake and Habbo to death. The Golden Age of Habbo was when it opened up until 2004/06.

[jasey]

They've been cost cutting for years, ever since they tried to monopolise but have failed in the process. Personally, I wouldn't feel sad if they shut up shop - their dreadful decision making skills, lack of community support and lack of drive to run the business has condemned Sulake and Habbo to death. The Golden Age of Habbo was when it opened up until 2004/06.

I would be inconsolable if they closed the site but I would like to see them make a major, major update. A huge update that changes everything wrong.