This month of November 2024 coincides with the 20th anniversary of the launch of Habbo Hotel in France. A true social network of the early 2000s, the video game playable on browser has been at the heart of numerous scandals.
Launched 20 years ago in France, Habbo Hotel marked an entire generation of players. In this virtual universe in pixel art playable on a browser, users were invited to recreate a universe in their image in an apartment they owned and to discover the creations of others in addition to regular activities by the Sulake teams, holder of the game. Above all, it was a place of exchange since we could chat with other players online.
But in this universe made of pixels where everything seems to be going well, there were hidden, in the shadows, acts of child crime, which the British channel Channel 4 reported on in 2012.
The media thus discovered sometimes very crude exchanges between adult users and children, who shared intimate photos while being convinced that they were facing other adolescents. The investigation reveals that more than 80 victims were abused by a single 21-year-old man, a sports coach, who used multiple pseudonyms to contact young girls. Hundreds of child pornography files were found on his computer. He will receive seven years in prison.
A limitation at the origin of a child abuse scandal
The lack of protection of minors Habbo Hotel – which did not require email or age verification to register – and the lack of effective moderation were singled out, so much so that Sulake found itself in a media and financial hurricane.
If since then, the game has continued to live, it still suffers from these old excesses and in particular from the worst of them: a virtual place which had allowed a place to become a pedophile den, the poorly named “pleasure pool”.
“To understand why these pedophilia scandals could have occurred in Habbo Hotel, we must put ourselves in the context of the time when moderation was non-existent and all the ingredients were there to create abuse,” recalls Julie* who played for several years Habbo Hotel.
She says: “in Habbo Hotelat first you couldn't get through another character. If he blocked an entrance, you simply couldn't get through. Some people understood this very quickly, and that’s how places like the pleasure pool could exist.”
Adult users looking for a way to abuse children advertised activity in the game's pools before ultimately blocking the exit ladders. They then took the opportunity to solicit the children innocently present in these areas with sexual remarks, thus posing as other children.
“The technique appeared with 4Chan where users trolled players to close certain areas, but I myself was treated to a sort of pool of pleasures, with adult users who made no secret of their intentions,” recalls Julien*, who was 13 at the time.
“It didn't traumatize me and I just tuned out while it passed, but after that, swimming pools were definitely a place to avoid and everyone knew it.”
Everyone? When the child sex offender scandal was revealed by Channel 4, it appeared that only 225 moderators were hired by the platform – for tens of millions of exchanges -, and that the vast majority focused on exchanges in English. At the same time, Habbo Hotel is however available in dozens of different countries, and even widely promoted on channels with a large audience including M6, the game's partner.
In the pool of pleasures, the scabrous remarks follow one another: “I remember having already called out one of these users who made salacious remarks, and they told me that he was laughing and then came to try to chat privately with me to obtain my MSN, even my mobile number,” says Ophélie*, who was 14 years old at the time.
Faced with this observation, and at the moment when Habbo Hotel sees its sponsors and partners leave the adventure abruptly – including M6 – Sulake changes its rules, and allows other characters to pass through. “A band-aid on a larger problem,” quips Julien*, “especially since other pornographic pieces were very easily found in Habbo Hotel.”
The scandal, one of the first of this magnitude for an online platform dedicated to children, – coupled with the abandonment of Flash Player technology in 2020, which requires a complete overhaul – will have got the better of the game.
Today, Habbo Hotel no longer has the same success but nevertheless continues to interest a handful of nostalgic fans. Sulake tried in June 2024 to relaunch itself by proposing a “Habbo Hotel Origins” which allowed us to return to the beginnings of this virtual adventure, but the enthusiasm only lasted for a while.
*the first names of the witnesses have been changed at their request
