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Virtual world Habbo has announced a deal with Paramount Pictures to create virtual goods for movies. Think Spiderman lunchboxes, but in the virtual world instead of the real one.
Specifically, users of Habbo will be able to buy things like accessories for their avatars, virtual furniture, and other worthless crap movie paraphernalia based off the movies “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” “Beowulf” and “Mean Girls.”
As cynical as I am about virtual worlds in general, this deal makes a lot of sense and could probably be pretty profitable for the two companies assuming they are adding virtual goods from titles that are hot with their young and fickle audience. Habbo claims more than 1.8 million teen users, most of whom can probably nag their parents into buying them a virtual Lindsay Lohan “Mean Girls” action figure if they really want one.
I think this may be an appropriate time to show Bill Maher’s video from a few months back about how ridiculous some of this Web 2.0 stuff must sound to outsiders: