[In Worlds in Motion sister site Gamasutra's latest China Angle column, dealing with all matters related to the vital Chinese game market, Frank Yu looks at the government's continued 'Operation for Tomorrow' crackdown, now targeting MMO game clients in internet cafes - and whether browser plugins like Flash and Shockwave, traditionally spurned by cafe users, may now point the way to the next 'console' of choice. The following excerpt deals specifically with Habbo's case.]

When Habbo Hotel shut down operations in China on August 2007, one of the main reasons cited was the reluctance of Chinese users to download Shockwave onto their machine -- the core plugin that enabled the browser-based virtual space to work.

At GDC 2008’s Worlds in Motion Summit, I asked the keynote speaker, Habbo lead concept designer Sulka Haro, why the Hotel was shut down in China when it has worked so well in other global locations. “There is no China. China doesn’t exist,“ was his jetlagged reply, adding “You should ask the business guys in China that question, I’m just the designer.”

Conveniently, Journi Keranen, the former business head of Habbo China and now president of iLemon in Shanghai was sitting next to me. “Yes, Shockwave was the problem at first. The servers were slow from the US and users didn’t want to download the plugin each time since the cafes would wipe it clean every day from their machines," he said.

"However," he continued, "we did manage to solve the server issue at some point with an agreement with Macromedia (developers of Shockwave, now part of Adobe) to have a customized plugin to be served locally. By then however, it was already too late and the decision to suspend operations was already in motion. However, we also had issues with headquarters on changes for localization.”

[The full column is now available at Gamasutra.]