Sulake Opens Mobile Virtual World Bobba
Sulake, the Finnish company behind the successful Habbo Hotel, has opened up Bobba to public beta. Bobba is a mobile only virtual world and is in very early stages of adoption. I was the 113th registered user on the site. This is something we heard of a while back with Sulake's report on their 2008 profit.
The signing up is done through the mobile application that all users have to download. The service is mobile only, so this is understandable - they want to have as many active accounts as possible. If people can't use and register through the mobile app account, they're less likely to use the virtual world at all. Before signing up, you need to download the mobile phone app though.
You have two ways of downloading the app, through the computer browser or the mobile phone. If you wish to go for the latter, you enter your mobile phone number and Sulake will send an SMS with a link to the app. I took this route and even though the service is still in beta, it gets some criticism from me for loading up the regular website that wasn't optimised at all for a mobile phone. When you're building a mobile virtual world - mobile's should be in the centre of the user experience.
Once you have downloaded the application, you can register and create your own avatar. The process is relatively straightforward and there's nothing new to learn if you're familiar with Habbo Hotel for example. Once you're setup with your avatar you're ready to move on and the next obvious step is to create your own space, ie. room. You can choose from a set of ready templates as a room or create one yourself from a blank room.
I did have a chat with some of the other Finnish users in the service and liked the way the chatting worked. Unfortunately, that is then again pretty much the only thing I really liked in the service. It works extremely smoothly and without any problems, but then again - it's the way things should work. The real downside I felt, that is still understandable - is the flow in the service; what do I do once I have set up my room, how do I find friends (I was unable to friend any of the other users), how do I decorate my room?
I guess I'm too eager - the service is in its early public beta, but this in my opinion is what the average user will probably see in the service.
Regardless
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thanks for another great article. I hope to see more articles from entrepreneurial point of view. What are the goals/expectations of the service? Why it took so long for them to push this out? I think they have been experimenting and studying this a for a while now. What did they learn? etc. I think it is quite interesting that they are targeting people over 16. Why? If I have understood right the users of Habbo are mostly under 16...
Kaitsu - good points on the minimum 16 yrs old.
Also, Sulake has been experimenting with the Mini Friday, so I guess this is sort of second version of it.
Good questions!
Thanks for the fair review, Antti. Hopefully when we have gathered the critical mass of users you can test it again and find some friends :-). The beginning time of a virtual world is usually a bit slow and actually we are happy to start like that to be able to fix the remaining bugs before the rush...
About the age target: there are two reasons for the >16y rule. 1) Adults don't want to hangout with teens, so we have to have separate services (and brands). 2) service works only on relatively expensive smartphones which younger users do not have in masses.
Interesting to see if we can hold this target age in practice: ultimately it is the users who choose the service, not the service who chooses the users!
I take it there is no iPhone version then...?
iPhone-version is in the works (actually by me :) ). Stay tuned :).
When you access the site with a mobile browser, at least with the Nokia WebKit browser, it should automatically switch to a low-graphics version of the site. However, this is not always 100% reliable, as you noticed, mainly because of mobile browser limitations. Which phone and browser did you use?
@Aapo, thanks for the comments. I am demanding, but do understand the shortcomings in the service as well as the "release early, release often" -mantra :) You are right about the age, will be interesting to see how this evolves age wise.
@Visa Thanks for getting back, I used a Nokia E75 mobile phone to access the site. I did have some other issues with the texts in the app, but I don't think those deserve a mention as my phone is not originally in the "supported phones" list.
Why mobile only? Sulake has the web know-how...and there are not many promising examples of mobile only social media / virtual world / game...are there?
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pls my phone is pocket window HTC
can i play bobba with my pc?
i can't find it
WTF!! why cant my phone play this shit! why does it have to be a nokia? my fucking mom had one of those cheap phones when i was like six there old and worthless!! unlike my phone the fucking DELVE!!!!!!
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