Steal an Egg, the most popular game on Roblox, was delisted on Monday afternoon shortly after reaching number one on the platform. Before it was pulled the pet simulator had more than 500,000 concurrent players - short of Steal a Brainrot or Grow a Garden at their peaks, but enough to make it the most visible experience on Roblox.
What Steal an Egg is
Players collect and raise eggs that hatch into pets, and those pets generate money every second they exist, with rarer animals earning more than typical monsters. Most players start with a small chicken and work up to fantastical creatures like dragons. Every player has a base, and as in Steal a Brainrot, other people on the server can run off with your assets. Eggs can also be taken from biomes across the map, each guarded by a guardian, with better eggs harder to steal.
Success comes down to speed, and speed can either be bought with real money or upgraded manually by running on a treadmill. The treadmills have a built-in feature called Reels that plays videos to help pass the time.
The treadmill went viral for the wrong reasons
Screenshots of that mechanic spread across social media, with onlookers calling it dystopian. Many of them came from a YouTube video by a user called Foltyn that generated 1.3 million views. The most common comparison was to "Fifteen Million Merits," a Black Mirror episode set in a world where people pedal stationary bikes to pay for basic living costs and electricity.
The parallel is not exact. In the episode, users are punished for looking away from the advertisements, while Steal an Egg's players are choosing to play. But the grind also pushes players toward microtransactions, which separates it from spending hours leveling a party in an RPG.
Why it disappeared is still unclear
Roblox did not immediately respond to a request for comment, so the reason for the takedown is unknown. One possibility is that the mechanic ran into the terms of service of platforms serving the videos: Roblox only allows users to share links from an approved list, which does not include TikTok or Instagram Reels, and the platform also prevents games from sharing unapproved websites. Roblox may also have been unable to control what players were watching in-game.
Steal an Egg's developers did not give a reason for the takedown on Discord, but told players the game would be back in a few hours. "Everyone getting extra stuff as a sorry," a developer wrote.