HMI House Season 3: Marrakech, the Salva Case and What Next

HMI House season 3 was supposed to be the Moroccan edition of HMI’s Snapchat reality show. Filming started in Marrakech in mid August 2025 and stopped there less than two weeks later. On August 21, old videos by the French comedian Salva, seen as insulting to Moroccans, resurfaced. His participation was cancelled, and on August 27 the production was announced to have left the country. Below: the timeline, what is known about the other seasons, and what creators can take from it, including how to grow an audience with TikTok followers.

What is HMI House?

HMI House is a French reality show made for Snapchat. About fifteen content creators share a villa for roughly thirty days, go through physical challenges and strategy games, and compete for a 50,000 euro prize. That amount was announced for the first season and kept afterwards.

What sets it apart from a TV show is the platform. The show lives first as public Stories on HMI’s Snapchat account, which vanish after 24 hours. The best moments are then cut up by dozens of fan accounts on TikTok, and the finales come out as long videos on YouTube. Nobody watches “the show” from start to finish. People follow it in pieces, throughout the day.

That is why HMI House keeps showing up in French TikTok trends without ever being broadcast there officially. A fight, an elimination or a rap clash can loop for days, pushed by repost accounts.

Who is HMI?

HMI, whose real name is Hachemi Sabi, was born in November 1995 in Marseille. Before Snapchat he worked as a software engineer with a master’s level degree, according to a profile published by the French site Digipote on November 2, 2025.

In February 2025 he became the most followed creator in France on Snapchat, overtaking Nasdas. Digipote counted about 13 million Snapchat subscribers in November 2025, against 1.3 million on Instagram, close to a million on TikTok and 355,000 on YouTube. The gap says a lot: his whole model rests on Snapchat, and the other networks work as a shop window.

He had already made headlines in December 2024, when the Rhône prefecture banned the Lyon date of his tour, which moved to Ambérieu-en-Bugey.

How many seasons, and which one is season 3?

The question keeps coming up in comments, and the answer is less obvious than it looks, because people don’t all count the same way.

1. Dubai, summer 2024. Thirteen influencers, and a finale that passed one million views on YouTube.
2. Thailand, late January to April 2025. Fifteen creators in Phuket, including Ovsie, Kms, Feliccia, Boucif, Fares Salvatore, Anaïs, Jannat, Nawarra and Djebril 94. A break during Ramadan. A rap clash between contestants added up to nearly 50 million views over about ten TikTok videos. The finale was released in French cinemas and on YouTube on April 22, 2025.
3. Marrakech, August 2025. The interrupted edition this article is about.

Le Tribunal du Net, in an article dated April 27, 2025, called the Thai edition the “third season”, and several TikTok accounts did the same. So a lot of videos titled “HMI House 3 winner” are about the April 2025 finale, which recaps credit to Djibril (Djebril 94). If you are looking for the Marrakech winner, those videos won’t tell you.

What happened in Marrakech in August 2025?

The Moroccan villa was unveiled around August 19 and 20, 2025, with the first tour videos shared on TikTok. The setting promised a bigger edition than before, and the version of this article published on September 10, 2025 called it “the most ambitious” one. It also listed a cast we have not been able to verify since, so we removed it.

Within days, filming ran into a problem the production had not seen coming: a contestant whose online past was well known to part of the Moroccan public.

Why was Salva removed?

Salva, known online as “Oh mon dieu Salva”, was among the announced contestants. On August 21, 2025, videos he had posted about nine years earlier started circulating again in Morocco. In them he mocked and insulted Arabs and Moroccan women. Internet users launched a campaign demanding that he leave the shoot.

HMI spoke on Snapchat. He said he had not known about those videos before inviting him, and summed up his position with a line quoted everywhere: “principles come before content”. Salva apologized to the Moroccan people, also on Snapchat. The Moroccan news site Bladi noted on August 24 that the accounts of his fate had shifted, first an immediate exit, then staying on to “ask for forgiveness”. Moroccan news accounts, though, had been reporting the cancellation of his participation since August 21.

@tft_morocco

La participation d’Ohmondieusalva à la HMI House a été annulée après ses insultes envers le Maroc et les Marocaines. ❌🇲🇦 #maroc #marocain #🇲🇦 #marocaine🇲🇦 #actualité #news #hmihouse #marrakech

♬ snowfall – Øneheart & reidenshi

Why did HMI House leave Morocco?

Removing Salva did not calm things down. Some Moroccan users blamed HMI for not vetting his cast, others targeted the show itself. On August 27, 2025, the creator Ibra TV announced that HMI House had left Morocco for another country. Moroccan accounts picked it up right away and presented it as a win for the campaign.

Digipote, in its November 2025 profile, sums up the sequence this way: filming stopped and the production left the country under public pressure and because of trouble with local authorities. The production itself never published a detailed statement.

@el.alaouiya

Ibra tv annonce que La Hmi House a quitté le Maroc pour un autre pays Bravo à la mobilisation de tous les marocains 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻🇲🇦🇲🇦🙏🏻

♬ son original – 👑el.alaouiya👑

A year later, two things are still unclear: where the show went next and how the season ended. Challenge clips kept circulating in early September 2025 under #hmihouse3, but no outlet has documented the location or the winner of that edition, so we give neither. Same for a season 4: as of September 22, 2026, there has been no official announcement, only guesses in the comments.

How does a Snapchat reality show make money?

The engine is the ads placed inside Stories. Since February 1, 2025, Snapchat has merged Story and Spotlight payouts into a single monetization program. The requirements Snap published are steep:

• at least 50,000 followers;
• 25 posts a month to Saved Stories or Spotlight;
• posting on at least 10 of the last 28 days;
• and, over 28 days, 12,000 hours of view time, or 10 million Snap views, or one million Spotlight views.

A daily show running for a month ticks every box at once. Each villa Story is an ad slot, and every invited contestant brings their own audience to the host’s account. The dozens of TikTok accounts reposting clips work as a free trailer, and the finale on YouTube or in cinemas extends the show’s life.

Marrakech shows the downside: a format built on internet personalities inherits everything they have ever posted. One badly vetted profile can stop a shoot.

What creators can learn from it

You don’t need a villa to use the mechanics that made HMI House work. Here is what I take from it, from the easiest point to the touchiest.

1. Cut for TikTok. The show runs long on Snapchat but gets discovered through 20 to 40 second clips. One strong moment, on-screen text, an open ending: that is what repost accounts pick up.
2. Look after the first push. A clip that starts with a few hundred views has a better chance of being pushed than one stuck at zero. A boost in TikTok views on your best sequence helps you clear that first step.
3. Reread your own history. The Salva case shows that videos from 2016 can come back in 2025. Before a high profile collaboration, scroll through your old content, and check the people you invite.

The last point is the least exciting one, and it is the one that cost the production the most.