Steal an Egg Vanished From Roblox Right After Hitting No. 1

The most popular game on Roblox this week asked kids to run on a treadmill while watching short-form videos to pass the time. Then it disappeared.

Steal an Egg was delisted Monday afternoon, shortly after climbing to number one on the platform and generating millions of negative impressions on social media. Before the takedown it had more than 500,000 concurrent players. That’s short of what Steal a Brainrot or Grow a Garden pulled at their peaks, but plenty to make it the most visible thing on Roblox.

Steal a Brainrot is so 2025, apparently.

What you actually do in Steal an Egg

The name does most of the work. You collect and raise eggs. Hatched eggs become pets, and every pet generates money every second it exists, with rarer animals earning more than the standard monsters.

Most players start small, with a chicken. Grind long enough and you’re raising dragons.

Everyone has a base, and just like Steal a Brainrot, other players on your server can walk off with your stuff. You can also steal eggs from biomes scattered across the map. Each biome has a guardian, and the better the egg, the harder the theft.

The treadmill is the part people can’t stop talking about

Success in Steal an Egg comes down to speed. You can buy speed with real money, or you can upgrade it manually by running on a treadmill.

The treadmills have a built-in feature called Reels, which lets you watch videos to help pass the time. Screenshots of the mechanic in action started going viral, with onlookers calling it dystopian. A lot of those screenshots trace back to a YouTube video from a user called Foltyn that pulled 1.3 million views.

The comparison everyone reached for was “Fifteen Million Merits,” the Black Mirror episode where people pedal stationary bikes in exchange for basic living costs and electricity.

It’s not a perfect match, and the differences matter. In the episode, users get punished for looking away from the ads. Steal an Egg’s players are there voluntarily, not running to survive.

Nobody has explained the takedown

Roblox did not immediately respond to a request for comment, so why the game got pulled is still unclear.

One possibility: the mechanic ran afoul of terms of service on platforms like TikTok. Roblox only lets users share links from an approved list, and that list doesn’t include TikTok or Instagram Reels. The platform also blocks games from sharing unapproved websites.

Steal an Egg’s developers didn’t offer a reason on Discord. They did promise the game would return in a few hours. “Everyone getting extra stuff as a sorry,” a developer wrote.

The uncomfortable part

Here’s what makes the outrage complicated. Who hasn’t put on a video or a podcast while doing something repetitive in a game? Steal an Egg just built that habit directly into the interface.

But the grind here is also pushing you toward microtransactions, which isn’t the same as spending a few hours leveling your party in an RPG. And Roblox may not have had any control over what players were watching inside the game, which could potentially be a recipe for disaster.

A treadmill you run on to earn faster dragons, with a video feed bolted to the front so the running doesn’t feel like running. Someone built that on purpose, and half a million people showed up.