Hype Crimes: Habbo Hotel Weekend How-To
The GigaOm derivative blogging weekend hype machine carries on.
Last holiday weekend, the Om himself misleading headlined “Five Facts on Google Phone,” to regurigate third-party rumors previously published elsewhere AND pile on with his own “sources say” conjecture.
This weekend, GigaOm staffer Wagner James Au presents “The How of Habbo Hotel.” A cutting edge, GigaOm original exculsive? Not quite.
Christian Nutt, Gamasutra, was on the Austin Game Developers Conference scene last week for extensive, direct coverage of Sulka Haro’s keynote on Sulake Labs’ Habbo Hotel. GigaOm’s Au subsequently piggybacks off of Nutt to announce a gaming “crime.”
The GigaOm Weekend piece notes “last week, Sulka Haro of Sulake Labs flew all the way to the GDC to explain how the teen-oriented, Shockwave-driven Habbo Hotel has grown from a tiny 2.5D space of two rooms into a masive place that last year made an estimated $77 million in revenue.”
Au goes on to say, “Gamasutra was on hand to take great notes, which is a good thing, because very few developers reportedly attended Haro’s talk.”
Really? Apparently ”very few” blogging network ‘reporters’ attended Haro’s talk as well. Which is undoubtedly a “good thing” for the GigaOm network because it can now “scoop” in to scoop “The How of Habbo Hotel” without the fuss, bother, expense, or first-hand origination required of journalism.
YAY for derivative blogging!
Au, however, sells “Gamasutra’s coverage” short. First off, Au never once directly credits the reporter that was actually on Austin scene to yield all the “great notes” for him to use free of charge (FYI Wagner, Chrisitan Nutt is his name). Moreover, the Nutt piece is not accurately defined as “great notes”; Nutt’s work is an in-depth, first-hand, case study report of a business model presented by a CEO. So in-depth, that Nutt’s original work is the foundation of Au’s “own” weekend story.
What’s more, Au declares a “phenomenal success of Habbo Hotel” as being “criminally under-appeciated by the game industry.”
Where is the purported crime, though? To back up his assertion, Au says Sulake Labs’ Habbo Hotel is a “massive place” that “last year made an estimated $77 million in annual revenue” with a staff of 300.
Using Au’s figures, the “criminal” Sulake game industry success story is a $250,000 revenue per employee one.
The Nintendo success story may be even more criminal then, as analyzed by Fortune magazine’s Jeffrey O’Brien:
The company’s 3,4000 employees generated $8.26 billion in revenue last year, or $2.5 million each. Over roughly the same time frame, Microsoft employees generated $624,000 each; Google’s peformed 50% better, at $994,000, though still less than half as well as Nintendo employees.
In other “criminal” Nintendo words, ten times the amount of revenue per Sulake employee.
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