We’re just as depressed as you are to learn that a “brainrot scrolling game” is a thing in Roblox, but we also can’t say that this revelation is entirely surprising. Thankfully, the platform is doing something about it, but then that’s only because one such game got viral and cast a spotlight on the fact that this sub-genre is on the UGC platform to begin with.
This is the story of Steal an Egg, a game on the platform that involves players finding rare eggs, raising them, and then using the pets that hatch from them to passively generate in-game money. As the name suggests, players are capable of entering others’ bases and stealing their rare eggs in a similar manner to the game Steal a Brainrot, but the twist here is that player characters can increase their run speed for escaping with stolen goods by either buying it with real money or placing their characters on a treadmill to watch gen AI slop videos from within the game itself.
The game’s popularity exploded, with player concurrency ballooning to over 500K at its peak, but it was removed from the platform by Roblox Corp this week and prompted the company to announce new restrictions against such games. Specifically, games that “[reward] users to consume a continuous feed of content without natural stopping points” will not be allowed for younger user accounts unless those mechanics are changed and removed. So really it’s less about stopping these games wholesale and preventing them from exploiting children.
In other Roblox news, the company has announced plans to establish a headquarters in Saudi Arabia as part of its “long-term investment in Saudi Arabia and [its] commitment to supporting the Kingdom’s digital economy objectives under Vision 2030,” otherwise know as the country’s catch-all term to expand its economy outside of oil, which partially involves its sportswashing endeavors, like investment into myriad video game companies and studios.
