One of the games that I’ve played the most is Habbo Hotel, it’s an old social game and an open world platform similar to Second Life, or Roblox with a strong demand for virtual clothes. Since it was founded in the year 2000, and they had reached 250 million users at one point, it is considered one of the first metaverses of the internet.
Inside habbo, wearing virtual clothing is one of the main income drivers of the game, and one of the main ways players express themselves.
I really like it as an example, because it’s one of the few virtual worlds that became a piece of internet history, and was going to go public in the stock market at over a billion euros at its peak, for a chat based game, it was very impressive.
They still release virtual clothes every week, and they have their own NFT, and an NFT-based currency too, their English user base is much smaller now in 2023 (it’s still very popular in Spanish, Portuguese and parts of Asia though).
I’ve seen Habbo do all sorts of things to get people interested in buying and wearing virtual clothes, like:
- Having a wide variety of clothes to choose from, both nice looking and worse looking clothes.
- Mimicry from the clothes that people wear in real life.
- Clothes that are too complex or impractical to wear in real life, so “virtual-native” clothing
- Numbered limited edition clothes. Habbo often releases “LTD clothes”, runs of 100, 500, 1000 clothes, each of them numbered like an NFT, these tend to be expensive, but usually go up in price significantly after they sell out (they sell out every time, because the runs are small and the player base is large). After you buy an item, the item exists in your inventory but it can’t be worn, once you wear the LTD item, it goes out of circulation and it is “soul bound” to your avatar. So there is no used clothing market for LTDs. This attracts a lot of demand from in-game collectors, traders, and investors as well, they just keep them “in their box” without using them, and they are traded in this form, and when the end user wears it, it goes out of circulation, making the available supply of this type of rare clothing go lower and lower over time.
- Rare clothes. Rare clothes are time limited releases. They can be bought only for a limited time, they are “rare” because their supply depends on how many people bought them during a certain time.
- Some clothes are crafted, which is like a gambling/lottery mechanic, becase you have to collect a lot of items to be able to craft a piece of clothing, and sometimes there are gachas with different probabilities to get what you wanted to craft, or to get the crafting materials, etc.
- Some in-game clubs/cults appeared around certain pieces of rare clothing (lol), some groups cornered the market for certain rare clothes and made clubs where you had to own a piece of clothing to be part of a club. One of these type of clothing is the Roboboy Face. I know (in-game) the richest player of Habbo.com who was behind this rare. He has one of the most exclusive clubs in the game. The Roboboy became a distinguishing clothing of people that are part of this group, the roboboy helmet has gone from costing around 180c at release to now being worth over 20,000c, and it’s usually not for sale anywhere, an over 100x markup on its original price…
Player behavior around clothing:
- A big portion of the player base just buys the clothes they like according to their own style.
- A big portion of the player base rarely buys new clothes, or just wears the default ones.
- A small portion of the player base always buys the latest clothes bought every week, and constantly changes clothes to match what is new/fashionable at the time.
- A small portion of the player base collects clothes and they don’t wear them.
- A small portion of the player base invests in clothes they think will go up in value in the future
Another mobile game that I saw that is selling a lot of virtual clothing is after 2020 is Zepeto, many companies and players design clothes for it. I even saw Disney designing clothes for that game.
The future of fashion in virtual worlds
I was trying VR this week with Meta’s Quest 2, and it feels like the next computing platform.
I haven’t tested these headsets much, since the Oculus Rift DK1, and the first HTC Vive. But, I think something like VRchat with money/open world mechanics, or a curated marketplaces can become VR’s Second Life or VR’s Habbo Hotel, which could be huge, a virtual world similar to Ready Player One’s Oasis.
