Summary
If you were anything like me as a kid, you spent alotof time playing Habbo Hotel. Despite there being really not all that much to do in the blocky pixelMMO, I was logged in for hours a day, popping into random guest rooms and talking to strangers of dubious ages and origins. I did a bunch of mazes and games, created by other users who paid for in-game currency that allowed them to buy furniture and props for this purpose. I roleplayed as a person in employment at various corporations and clubs. I sat in chatrooms with my friends and talked the night away. It was a good time.
Considering that was almost twenty years ago, and I am now a gainfully employed adult who isnotroleplaying, I don’t really know anybody who still plays Habbo Hotel. I know a couple of my friends made accounts again during the pandemic, when everybody was feeling stir-crazy and there was nothing else to do, which seems to have led to a resurgence. Yet, the game that they logged into was very different from the one we played as kids. Every regional server has been merged into the U.S. one, making it an international game instead of one where you could talk to people from the same place as you. There’s even a Habbo app oniOSso you’ll never be without it.
However, the number of players has also been decimated. In 2012,the game faced a massive scandalthat showed that predators and groomers were sending the game’s young players very explicit, sexual messages, which tracks, because I experienced it myself as a child. This was when the internet was still largely unmoderated and game chat was a free for all cess pit. After a mass player exodus, the developers then decided the best thing to do would be tothrow NFTs in the mix. Do two controversies make a success?
Don’t Worry Though, We’re Getting The Old Habbo Back
It’s hard not to get nostalgia-baited by this if you’re already over a certain age, though. I posted the news in my group chat and immediately got a resounding “hell yeah” from my friends, who all range from their mid-twenties to early thirties. The thing is that when I think about Habbo Hotel, I’m reminded of a deep shame from my childhood, a story I thought was unique to me and my lack of self-restraint that I have since learned is a very shared experience.
Habbo Hotel Was How I Learned Microtransactions Are Evil
Back in the day, you could buy Habbo Hotel credits through SMS. These credits could be used for a lot of things – you could buy furniture for your rooms, purchase special clothes, and use them to join Habbo Club, which was the height of luxury in the game and let you give your avatar special outfits and hairstyles. If you wanted respect in Habbo, you wanted to be part of Habbo Club.
Obviously, as a lonely kid, I wanted the clout. I was starving for clout. I wanted to be taken notice of. I didn’t have a lot of allowance – just enough to buy food in the school canteen every day – and therefore couldn’t afford to buy the prepaid cards they sold readily in convenience stores, so I figured I’d buy credits through my phone. I was a kid, and I didn’t really understand the concept of a phone bill, so it didn’t occur to me that the money I was compulsively spending on credits would have to be paid for bysomeone.
It started slowly. I’d message Habbo a couple of times a month, just enough to load up on furniture. When I started wanting more, I’d text several times a week, until the provider cut me off. Then I stopped eating lunch at school so I could spend my allowance on prepaid cards. I’m unsure how much money I spent in total, and I haven’t been able to find the spending limits for 2006 online.
Note: Icouldask my father how much he ended up paying, but I don’t really want to remind him that I did this, just in case I lose my favourite child status.
It was definitely in the hundreds, though, I can tell you that. And I probably wouldn’t have stopped if my father hadn’t picked me up from school one day, turned off the engine, and demanded to know why the hell my phone bill was so high. How long had I been doing this, at this point? I don’t know. But I was as rich as the devil in Habbo, and that counted for something.
We Probably Shouldn’t Let Kids Spend Money In Games
It took a stern telling off from my dad for me to realise that yeah, game money is real, and somebody has to pay for it. I kept buying credits, but only through prepaid cards, so that my parents wouldn’t yell at me again. I thought I was a uniquely bad child, that nobody else could ever be so brazen to do this to their parents, but I was obviously wrong – this has happened to alotof people.This Reddit threadhas users describing the lengths they went to to get credits, including sneakily buying them on a friend’s phone and using the display phones at mobile stores.
The problem is not the kids – everybody who’s ever met a child or been one knows that children aren’t born with a fundamental understanding of the value of money or even a modicum of self-control. Habbo Hotel intentionally designed a system where children could easily buy credits to put themselves on the right side of a class divide, the haves (Habbo Club members) against the have nots (normies).
It’s pretty easy to draw a link from this system to the one used now by modern games that also cater to children, like Roblox and Fortnite, and see how predatory monetisation takes advantage of kids who really don’t know any better. Really, the only thing that can fix this is regulation, andeven that doesn’t go far enough. Habbo was the first game to take financial advantage of children on such a large scale, but it’s far from the last.
