Right now, the number one game on Roblox is called Steal a Brainrot. It’s exactly what it sounds like. The entire premise of the game is to rob the other players. Despite that being the point of the game, though, children are having a hard time dealing with the repercussions of having their digital characters stolen — and the meltdowns are going hugely viral.
The objects of desire are meme-like voxel characters that the game generates at random. Think of them like the capitalist Gen Alpha version of Pokémon, except instead of catching ’em all for funsies, you bag brainrots to make as much in-game money as possible. Many of them reference the surreal “Italian brainrot” phenomenon where people generate AI images of animals fused with random objects. The first known Italian brainrot character, also known as Tralalero Tralala, mashed together a shark with feet sporting Nike shoes; naturally it’s one of the most valuable creatures in Steal a Brainrot.
I cannot emphasize enough how much the game whittles itself down to the most ruthless experience possible. When you join a server, the only things populating the world are a series of cage-like houses and a line of brainrot prisoners running down the middle of the map. You start with a bit of cash in your pocket, which you can use to buy one of the brainrots marching down the conveyer belt. Or, as beginner guides to the game encourage, you can jump in there and just … steal a brainrot from someone else.
Brainrots are stored in areas whose express purpose is to display your collection on pillars. You cannot decorate your base. You can only generate a shield, and it lasts for 60 seconds before it needs to cool down. Brainrots that you own generate money for as long as you have them — and players can see exactly what anything is worth by looking into your area. So it’s not uncommon to see people standing outside of your house, peering silently as they assess whether or not they’re going to try you. What if Gen Z stare but make it game?
Millions of people are playing Steal a Brainrot, many of them presumably children given that around 40% of Roblox users are under the age of 12. Around 44 percent of Roblox users are between the ages of 17 and 25, but there’s a sizable contingent of grown adults on Roblox as well — which is part of the tension at the heart of the brainrot community.
Yes, the point of the game is to make out like a bandit. But videos of kids absolutely losing it after someone steals their brainrot are huge on places like TikTok, where a single video can accrue millions upon millions of views. The first result when you search “steal a brainrot” on the platform is a young child crying as he’s being recorded by his older sister, who warns viewers that she’ll get revenge for crossing her sibling. The video has 36.2 million views. “I hope I never get to the point where I’m bullying a little kid cuz he has emotions and lost something hard he worked for,” the sister says in a follow-up video.
The comments for these uploads are a tangle of people offering encouragement to the mourning player, and confused spectators who reiterate that the name of the game is Steal a Brainrot. Presumably, most people playing the game will eventually steal someone else’s hard-earned NFT. Stealing might’ve even been the very first thing a newbie player does, given that it’s more profitable to begin with an expensive brainrot than starting from scratch.
Somehow, this only gets messier. Steal a Brainrot has a store where you can spend Robux, Roblox’s digital currency that costs real-world money. There’s also a store where you can purchase basic items, like traps and weapons, using the dollars you accrue in the game. But the best items are only available for cash. These can span from simple guns that cost just under $5 to straight-up server admin abilities that require purchasing the $49.99 tier of Robux. You can pay to win, in other words, at least until someone decides that they want your brainrot.
There’s also a mechanic that the game calls Rebirth, where players lose everything they’ve acquired to start over with better stats and more money. The more you do it the more powerful you are. You can only do a Rebirth after garnering a small fortune to begin with, however. So even if you somehow avoid getting fleeced by other users, there’s still a high likelihood you’ll walk away from Steal a Brainrot with absolutely nothing to show for it.
As of this writing — during prime work/school/camp hours — there are 2.7 million people actively playing Steal a Brainrot. The population has reached up to 5 million players at once in early July. But already, Steal a Brainrot has surpassed the incredible popularity behind Grow a Garden, which has topped the Roblox charts for months on end. While Steal A Brainrot hasn’t quite reached the peaks of Grow a Garden, which broke records for most concurrent players in any game ever earlier this year, it’s still expanding nearly every day.
Much of this ballooning player base can be attributed to the game’s visibility on social media, where clips of people scheming against their neighbors go viral due to their inherent drama. But stealing with the explicit purpose of upsetting others, especially kids, has become a genre onto its own on places like YouTube. Creators will often boast in all caps that they managed to make a kid cry, or detail how they spent money to ruin a kid’s day.
On Friday, someone uploaded a video titled I Spent 24 Hours Stealing Brainrots From Kids. “This generation is being raised on one single thing: brainrot,” the narrator says at the start of the video, seemingly defending why he went in with the intention of making players angry. “A phenomenon of dulling your mind into mush by watching absolute garbage.”
It’s difficult to assess how much Steal a Brainrot might be generating in revenue, but in 2024, Roblox paid $741 million between 12,000 developers. A game like Adopt Me!, a long-standing mainstay in the world of Roblox, is estimated to make around $60 million a year. Currently, Adopt Me! is tenth on the charts, with a mere 108k players. Steal A Brainrot has significantly more players, and plenty of microtransaction options to offer them.
Steal a Brainrot is the creation of two people, do_small and SpyderSammy, but the game is owned by Do Big Studios — which also owns Grow A Garden. While Do Big does develop its own games, it also engages in strategic acquisitions of Roblox games. It’s a practice that’s proven controversial for some Roblox users, especially as the studio purchases more games from small-team or young developers. Do Big has become known for its implementation of FOMO monetization, like limited-time skins and battle passes, which it adds to games that previously did not include these structures. A game built around stealing from others arguably distills that anxiety into its purest form. You’re missing out because someone else always has something you don’t, and there’s little room to engage with Steal a Brainrot in any other way than this specific lens.
“Who are these corporations to come in and monopolize Roblox like it’s nothing more than floating dollar signs,” a YouTuber called Bedsheet Ghost says in a video critical of the company that owns Steal A Brainrot, where he also urges developers to stop selling their games to these entities.
Do Big and the developers behind the game aren’t complete outsiders to Roblox, however. SpyderSammy says he’s been making Roblox titles since 2013, while the executive team at Do Big has been around for around 15.
“Fun fact: Do Big has no investors, no funding, nothing like that,” the company wrote in a June post celebrating the success of its games. “We all come from the same place — passionate Roblox devs who grew up making games on the platform. We’ve also rethought how we approach monetization in our games… but we’ll let our actions speak louder than our words going forward.”
Source：https://www.polygon.com/616251/steal-a-brainrot-roblox-explainer-what-is
