Sulake, the Finnish parent company behind the successful virtual world Habbo Hotel is expected to lay off 40 staff members (20 percent of their global workforce). The news arrived yesterday via effected employee’s tweets, as well as articstartup.com, with layoffs to be focused in Helsinki.

Sulake employs approximately 300 people across 13 countries, and claims in the neighborhood of 12 million monthly unique visits to it’s tween-friendly virtual world Habbo Hotel. While Habbo Hotel features a number virtual celebrities’ represented in the world, in 2008 Sulake reported that they’d garnered around €50 million ($73 million) in revenues, but only turned a profit of around €1 million ($1.5 million).

In addition to Habbo Hotel, Sulake also runs the Finnish social networking platform IRC-Galleria, and recently launched another virtual world, Bobba, this time centered around a smartphone platform, with eventual plans to port the virtual world to a PC platform. Bobba is aimed at attracting an older demographic than then tween focused Habbo Hotel.

And on the other side of the coin….

Irvine, California based True Games, which recently announced the opening of a new development studio in Austin, Texas, seems to be on the growth warpath. Announced yesterday, True Games has now established an External Development Division and is now seeking to publish new content on it’s TrueTech gaming platform. Not limited to one genre, True Games seems to be seeking a full catalogue of offerings, including but not limited to RPG, RTS, racing, FPS, sports, action, simulation, and the list goes on. This content may be original or licensed online games that would be operated under the microtransaction model.

“We currently have several top quality products in development, but in addition to our own content, we also want to take advantage of our extremely capable TrueTech platform’s capabilities by operating additional online games. There are developers out there creating amazing online content, however, they don’t have the means to bring it to market on their own. That is exactly the kind of partner we are looking for,” said Jeff Lujan founder and CEO of True Games.

As for Sulake, it’s an interesting twist. While Habbo is one of the most popular destinations for their target market, taking in $73 million in revenues and only producing $1.5 million in profit is certainly cause to raise an eyebrow. With that said, the buzz surrounding Habbo has been nothing but positive for as long as memory serves, and a 20 percent staff reduction seems a bit out of the ordinary. A harbinger of darker days ahead for the Finnish firm? Hopefully not. And again, heading in a completely opposite direction, True Games seems to be poised to pounce on the microtransaction market. Their first release, Epic Warrior seems to be doing well in an already competitive market, a highly anticipated release just around the corner (Mytheon), a new studio in Austin, and now an external development team? True Games…one to watch.

Tags: Habbo, sulake, True Games

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 10:50 am and is filed under industry news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.