If there's one thing Roblox players seem to love as of late, it's brainrot. You've got the Plants vs. Zombies-inspired brainrot game, Brainrot Evolution, and one of the biggest brainrot games going, Steal A Brainrot. If that sentence has you feeling about 150 years old, just bear with me, because it's only going to get worse from here.
Steal A Brainrot—a Roblox custom game where you hoard collectible meme characters in exchange for virtual currency, of which PC Gamer evergreen writer Kara Philips said "sensory overload is a complete understatement"—has filed a complaint against Stealing Brainrots, a Fortnite custom game which the Steal a Brainrot team at Spyder Games alleges is "a copy."
The suit states Stealing Brainrots "copies [Steal A Brainrot's] protectable expressions," giving examples like "user interface elements … in-game objects, artwork, level design, animations, design aesthetics," and increasingly nebulous stuff like "the selection and coordination of game elements, colors, and shapes."
It's worth noting that both games are specifically themed around Italian Brainrot, a specific wave of surreal AI-generated meme images that went around earning names like Chimpanzini Bananini and Bombardiro Crocodilo. The suit does not claim ownership of these characters specifically, which makes its angle hard to identify.
Steal A Brainrot may be the biggest brainrot game on Roblox, with an ego death-inducing 35.9 billion visits, but it wasn't exactly the first; Italian Brainrot Quiz, for instance, went live a month earlier and has since accrued 121 million visits.
I suppose Spyder Games takes issue with the fact that it's a brainrot theft game specifically, but as Aftermath spotted in its report on this, there are much larger clones in Fortnite. Steal A Brainrot's legal representative, attorney Adam Starr, told Aftermath they had no choice but to act: "We always prefer to resolve these matters cooperatively, but when necessary we will take appropriate legal steps to safeguard our IP.”
While Roblox developers do earn money from games made on the platform, the platform takes a sizable cut of the profits made. Fortnite has a similar creator program for its custom game browser, and is gearing up to allow developers to sell items within their games, though Epic still takes a big chunk of the money. If you think that sounds like a roundabout take on child labor given the demographics we're talking about here, you aren't the first.
What a week, eh? Oh, it's Monday? Ignore me, then. As Roblox Corporation CEO Dave Baszucki put it: "If you're not comfortable, don't let your kids be on Roblox." They might just like it there.
