Habbo

Habbo's main feature is the "hotel", and consists of a client made using the Unity platform. The hotel can be accessed by logged-in users via the Habbo Homepage. When a user accesses the Hotel they are brought to a screen colloquially known as Hotel View/Landing View. From this screen, members can navigate to virtual rooms via the Navigator and browse the rooms of the hotel, look for items to buy in the catalogue, private message friends on their friends list or enter their preset Home room.

Public Rooms are rooms which are available to all members. They often depict scenes such as restaurants, cinemas, and dance clubs. Most Public Rooms contain automated bots (non-player characters) that shout pre-recorded messages and tips, and can give avatars drinks and food items. Public Rooms are designed by Sulake and are not customizable by users. Rooms in the Habbo Hotel: Origins client contain games such as Wobble Squabble, Lido Diving, Battle Ball and the Cunning Fox Gamehall with games such as Noughts and Crosses, Battleships, Chess and Poker.

Habbo stemmed from a 1999 hobby project by creative designer Sampo Karjalainen and technologist Aapo Kyrölä entitled Mobiles Disco, for a Finnish band. It was a virtual chat room running on Kyrölä's Fuse technology. After having been contracted to design a virtual game and chat called Lumisota (Snow Wars) for a Finnish internet service provider, they were contracted for another project. They developed Hotelli Kultakala (Hotel Goldfish) with a small team of developers. It launched in August 2000 on the ISP's web portal.

Kyrölä, Karjalainen and Dee Edwards, an entrepreneur from the UK, wanted to create an international business based on the virtual hotel concept, drafting a plan in autumn 2000, and raised finance. By the end of January 2001, Habbo Hotel had been launched in beta mode. The new hotel exited beta a few weeks afterwards, aimed at the teenage market, with marketing and payment partners in place, run from a HQ in London. It featured a new credits system with community and safety features.

In November 2001, The Daily Telegraph listed Habbo as a top-10 chat and instant messaging site, describing it as "great-looking" and "proving popular with teenagers." In 2005 and 2006, Habbo Australia received the NetGuide Online Web Award for "Best kids'/youth website". In September 2006, Sulake won Deloitte's Fast 50 competition.

Common Sense Media, a non-profit association advocating for children and families, and studying the effects that media and technology have on young users, reports that "[f]oul talk and sexy chat rooms dominate [this] virtual world", giving it one star out of five and not recommending it for kids of any age.