This week’s biggest Roblox hit handed kids a treadmill to run on and short-form videos to watch while they did it. Then it was gone.
Steal an Egg came off the platform Monday afternoon, not long after it reached number one and racked up millions of negative impressions across social media. Its concurrent player count had passed 500,000 before the removal. Steal a Brainrot and Grow a Garden both hit higher peaks, but that was still enough to make Steal an Egg the loudest thing on Roblox.
Steal a Brainrot is so 2025, apparently.
What you actually do in Steal an Egg
The title explains most of it. Eggs are what you gather and raise. Once they hatch, they turn into pets, and each pet earns money for every second it’s alive — rarer animals pay out more than the run-of-the-mill monsters.
A chicken is where most players begin. Put in enough hours and dragons are on the table.
Each player gets a base, and much like in Steal a Brainrot, anyone else on your server can make off with what’s inside. Eggs can also be lifted from biomes dotted around the map. A guardian watches over every biome, and the more valuable the egg, the tougher the job.
The treadmill is the part people can’t stop talking about
Speed decides how well you do in Steal an Egg. Real money buys it outright, or you can grind it up by hand on a treadmill.
Those treadmills ship with a feature called Reels, a video feed meant to make the time go by. Screenshots of it in action spread quickly, with viewers describing the whole setup as dystopian. Many of them can be traced to a YouTube video from a creator named Foltyn, which drew 1.3 million views.
Almost everyone landed on the same reference point: “Fifteen Million Merits,” the Black Mirror episode in which people pedal stationary bikes to cover basic living costs and electricity.
The analogy has holes, and they’re worth noting. Looking away from the ads gets you punished in the episode. Players in Steal an Egg chose to be there, and nobody is running to stay alive.
Nobody has explained the takedown
The reason for the removal remains unknown; Roblox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s one theory: the mechanic may have collided with the terms of service on platforms such as TikTok. Only links from an approved list can be shared by Roblox users, and neither TikTok nor Instagram Reels appears on it. Games are likewise barred from sharing websites that haven’t been approved.
On Discord, the game’s developers gave no explanation. What they did say was that the game would be back within a few hours. “Everyone getting extra stuff as a sorry,” one developer wrote.
The uncomfortable part
This is where the backlash gets messy. Sticking on a video or a podcast during a repetitive stretch of a game is something nearly everyone has done. Steal an Egg simply wired that behavior straight into the interface.
Still, this grind is steering you toward microtransactions, which puts it in a different bracket than burning a few hours leveling an RPG party. There’s also the possibility that Roblox may not have had any control over what players were watching inside the game, which could potentially be a recipe for disaster.
Run on a treadmill to unlock dragons sooner, with a video feed strapped to the front so the running stops feeling like running. That was a deliberate design decision, and half a million people turned up for it.