Meccha Chameleon's Roblox clones now have more players than the Steam original

Meccha Chameleon — the $6 Steam hit where players use MS Paint-style tools to camouflage themselves among game assets — is getting out-cloned on Roblox. The two-person dev team sold 15 million copies in its first month and peaked at over 340,000 concurrent players, but the game now sits around 100,000 concurrent on Steam. Meanwhile, the Roblox knock-offs have collectively surpassed that number, according to data compiled by Reddit user RoWatcher.

The clone ecosystem is sprawling. [BACKROOMS] Chameleon! is currently the dominant version with nearly 50,000 concurrent players, while Paint Or Seek sits at 37,000. A dozen-plus other copycats — Paint and Seek!, Paint to Hide, Paint or Die, and more — each pull one to several thousand players. Paint Or Seek is free, runs on smartphones, and lives on a platform millions of kids use daily. Many of those players likely have no idea Meccha Chameleon exists. The clones monetize through in-game coin purchases that unlock key tools like a color-matching eyedropper — the same mechanic that makes the original fun.

This is part of a broader Steam-to-Roblox pipeline that's been accelerating. R.E.P.O, Peak, Lethal Company, and Among Us all have Roblox counterparts. This month a second Steam viral hit is getting the same treatment: Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library has a Roblox clone called Clean the Library that has already hit a peak of 83,591 players and racked up 70 million visits — while only around 7,000 people are playing the Steam original. Roblox is structurally built on this kind of "inspiration"; the platform profits from the traffic regardless of where the idea originated. Whether these clones actually violate Roblox's rules isn't clear, and Kotaku says it has reached out to Roblox for comment.

The situation puts small indie studios in a tough spot. Meccha Chameleon's two-person team built a genuine viral hit, but the open nature of Roblox means a free, phone-accessible clone can absorb a huge chunk of the potential audience before those players ever see the Steam store page. No response from Roblox had been published at the time of writing.