In January, on a livestream, the Roblox YouTuber KreekCraft stopped himself mid-sentence. “Should I say this? I don’t know if I should say this. This might be a bad idea,” he said, before telling his 16 million subscribers that one game had made him more than a million dollars. Months later he posted a correction on X: “I lied. I’ve actually made over $2,000,000 from Steal a Brainrot.”
He has never built a Roblox game. He films himself playing one.
That gap is the real story behind the question people keep typing into Google. Steal a Brainrot is a Roblox experience released on May 16, 2025 by the developer SpyderSammy under DoBig Studios, in which players steal cartoon “brainrot” characters from each other’s bases and sell them for in-game cash. It became the most-played thing on the internet for a stretch of late 2025, peaking at 25,836,222 concurrent players on October 11, 2025, according to the tracking site Rolimon’s. Today it runs closer to 100,000.
Nobody outside DoBig Studios knows exactly what it earned. What’s public is a set of estimates that disagree with each other by a factor of three, a platform payout rate Roblox publishes openly, and a decay curve steep enough to reframe what “a hit Roblox game” is actually worth.
Last updated: October 2026
Quick answers
How much money does Steal a Brainrot make?
Steal a Brainrot makes an estimated $1.4 million to $4.4 million a month for its developer as of October 2026, according to the trackers RoWatcher and Profitable.app. At its August 2025 peak, Creator Exchange estimated about $11 million a month. DoBig Studios has never published an official figure.
Who owns Steal a Brainrot?
Steal a Brainrot was created by the Roblox developer SpyderSammy and is published under DoBig Studios, which released it on May 16, 2025. The studio also licensed a version to Epic Games for Fortnite Creative and has a film adaptation in development with Story Kitchen.
How much does Roblox pay developers per Robux?
Roblox pays $0.0038 per earned Robux through its Developer Exchange program, up from $0.0035 before September 5, 2025. Developers keep 70% of the Robux spent inside their experience, so roughly 21 to 27 cents of each real dollar a player spends reaches the creator as cash.
How much money does Steal a Brainrot make?
The honest answer is a range, not a number: between roughly $1.4 million and $4.4 million a month in developer earnings as of early October 2026. RoWatcher’s model puts it at about $1.43 million a month and labels its own confidence at 82%. Profitable.app, pulling data through October 7, 2026, puts the trailing 30 days at $4.4 million and lifetime earnings at $589.3 million.
Every page currently ranking for this question states one of those numbers as fact. None of them mention that the other exists.
The $11 million figure that circulates in tweets and TikToks has a specific origin and a specific date. Creator Exchange, which tracks Roblox experience performance, named Steal a Brainrot its “biggest overall mover” with estimated monthly revenue of $11 million, up 117%, against 720 million hours played, up 88%. That post is from August 2025. It describes the steepest part of the game’s growth curve, not its current state, and it has been quoted as present-tense fact for more than a year.
DoBig Studios has disclosed nothing. Roblox does not break out earnings by experience in its filings, and the Q2 2026 shareholder letter reports only the platform-wide figure: $363 million in Developer Exchange fees for the quarter, up 15% from $316 million a year earlier.
Why the public estimates disagree by 3x
The estimates disagree because none of them measure revenue. They model it from visit counts, and the assumptions inside those models do the real work.
Profitable.app publishes its method, which is rare and worth reading closely. It derives earnings from visits using four inputs: a 2% engagement rate, an average of 150 Robux spent per engaged session, the 70% developer revenue share, and the $0.0038 DevEx rate. Change the engagement assumption from 2% to 1% and the output halves. Change the per-session spend from 150 Robux to 100 and it drops by a third again. RoWatcher does not publish its inputs, which is most likely why its number lands near a third of Profitable.app’s.
There’s a second problem that trips up almost every write-up on this topic. Profitable.app’s $4.4 million figure is already net of the 70% split and already converted at the DevEx rate, which means it estimates what reaches the developer, not what players spent. Working backward from it, players would need to spend roughly 1.65 billion Robux a month inside the game, with a retail value somewhere between $16 million and $21 million depending on whether they bought through the web or a mobile app store.
That distinction matters when a number gets repeated. “The game makes $4.4 million a month” and “players spend $20 million a month in the game” describe the same estimate from opposite ends, and the gap between them is the platform’s cut.
| Source | Monthly estimate | As of | Method disclosed | What to use it for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creator Exchange | ~$11 million | August 2025 | No | The peak, not the present |
| Profitable.app | $4.4 million | Oct 7, 2026 | Yes, fully | An upper bound you can audit |
| RoWatcher | ~$1.43 million | Oct 2026 | No, 82% confidence claimed | A conservative floor |
| DoBig Studios | Not disclosed | n/a | n/a | The only number that would settle it |
What actually reaches the creator from every dollar
Roughly 21 to 27 cents of every dollar a player spends on Robux reaches the game’s creator as cash. That figure comes from two numbers Roblox publishes itself, and the arithmetic is simple enough to check.
Roblox raised its Developer Exchange rate from $0.0035 to $0.0038 per earned Robux at 10am PT on September 5, 2025, an increase of about 8.5%. Developers keep 70% of the Robux spent inside their experience. On the retail side, $9.99 buys 1,000 Robux on the Roblox website and 800 through a mobile app store.
Run that through. A player spending $9.99 on mobile gets 800 Robux; the creator earns 560 of them and cashes out at $2.13, or 21.3% of what the player paid. The same $9.99 spent on the web yields 1,000 Robux, 700 to the creator, $2.66 in cash, or 26.6%. Grey Journal calculated both figures from Roblox’s own published rates, and either way, three-quarters of the money stops before it reaches the person who built the game.
That spread is not unusual for a platform that handles distribution, payments, moderation, and app store fees. It’s worth knowing before you model a Roblox business on headline revenue estimates, in the same way that X’s payout formula changes what a view is worth and Flip’s shutdown payout of $2.91 per creator changed what “creator fund” meant in practice.
Roblox is now changing how that money lands, if not how much of it there is. At RDC 2026 the company announced Roblox Wallet, an account provided through Airwallex US that pays eligible US creators every business day as holds clear, with a Roblox Card to follow in 2027. Faster cash, same split.
Is Steal a Brainrot still growing in 2026?
No. Steal a Brainrot peaked at 25,836,222 concurrent players on October 11, 2025 and ran between roughly 90,000 and 205,000 concurrent players in the first week of October 2026, a decline of more than 99% from peak. Total visits have kept climbing to about 73.9 billion, because visits only accumulate, which is exactly why visit-based revenue models overstate a declining game.
The fall is not a straight line. Profitable.app’s daily table for September 24 through October 7, 2026 swings from 57,000 concurrent players to 204,400 and back to 102,500, with daily estimated earnings moving between $88,500 and $266,000 over the same two weeks. Update days and events spike it; the baseline keeps sinking.
The platform is drifting the same way. Roblox reported 123 million daily active users and 29 billion hours engaged in Q2 2026, and its top 10 experiences accounted for about 20% of those hours, down from 30% three years earlier, per the company’s Q2 2026 shareholder letter. Experiences outside the top 10 grew hours 25% year over year and Robux spend more than 20%. Attention on Roblox is spreading out, which makes a single 25-million-player spike harder to repeat than it was in 2025.
The game’s biggest moments came well after its revenue peak. A Bruno Mars virtual concert inside the experience drew 12.8 million concurrent players in January 2026 alongside 10 million livestream viewers. Epic Games licensed a Fortnite Creative version, Steal the Brainrot, which peaked around 500,000 concurrent players. DoBig Studios has a film in development with Story Kitchen, and Spyder Games sued the maker of an unlicensed Fortnite imitation called Stealing Brainrots in October 2025.
Those are the moves of a studio that understood what it had. Attention on Roblox is borrowed, not owned, and the licensing, concerts, and film deals read as an attempt to convert a spike into something with a longer half-life, the same instinct behind MrBeast’s Google Gemini deal.
How much do Roblox creators actually make?
The median Roblox creator in the Developer Exchange program earned about $1,500 in the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, while the top 10 creators averaged $65.7 million each. Roblox disclosed both figures at its Developers Conference in San Jose in September 2026, and the distance between them is the single most useful fact on this page.
The platform-level totals look like a boom. Roblox says creators earned approximately $1.7 billion in those 12 months and more than $5 billion since DevEx launched in 2013, figures CEO David Baszucki published in the company’s own RDC 2026 announcement. More than 42,000 creators now participate. A year earlier, Roblox’s annual economic impact report put the median at $1,575 against 24,500 participants.
So the pool grew about 50% year over year, the number of creators sharing it grew about 70%, and the median went down.
| Tier | Average earnings | Prior year | Multiple of median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 10 creators | $65.7 million | $33.9 million | ~43,800x |
| Top 100 creators | $10.8 million | $6 million | ~7,200x |
| Top 1,000 creators | $1.4 million | $820,000 | ~933x |
| Median DevEx creator | ~$1,500 | $1,575 | 1x |
Half of the 42,000 creators who cleared the bar to join DevEx at all made $1,500 or less for a year of work. The ones who didn’t clear the bar don’t appear in the data. This is the same distribution Grey Journal has tracked across every major creator platform, and it is why the number of income streams a creator runs predicts their survival better than any single platform’s payout rate.
Why the content about the game out-earned most studios
KreekCraft’s reported $2 million from Steal a Brainrot content exceeds the $1.4 million average for the top 1,000 Roblox creators by building, and he did it without shipping a line of Lua. Dexerto reported the first $1 million claim in January 2026; he revised the figure upward on X.
The economics explain themselves once you line them up. A Roblox developer keeps 21 to 27 cents on the player’s dollar and carries the servers, the moderation load, the update treadmill, and the risk that a competitor clones the loop in a weekend. A YouTuber covering the same game keeps a far larger share of AdSense revenue, owns the audience relationship outright, and can move to the next hit the week this one cools.
Steal a Brainrot’s audience lived on YouTube before it ever opened the game. The genre is built for it: short sessions, visible loot, constant updates, and characters designed to be screenshotted. Every update DoBig Studios shipped generated free video inventory for thousands of channels, and the channels converted that attention into ad revenue with none of the development cost.
This is not new, and it is the most transferable lesson here. Covering a gold rush beats mining in it. Picks and shovels are now a thumbnail and an upload schedule, which is also why the burnout curve for trend-chasing creators is so steep: the model requires catching the next one.
What builders should take from the curve
Treat a Roblox hit as a cash event with a one-year half-life, not as a business with recurring revenue. Steal a Brainrot went from launch to the biggest game on the platform in five months, then shed more than 99% of its concurrent players over the following twelve. Planning a studio around a sustained $11 million a month would have been a mistake even while the number was accurate.
Three things follow from that, and they apply well beyond Roblox.
Model the net, not the headline. Before you commit to a platform, find its published payout rate and its revenue split and compute what a customer dollar is worth to you after both. For Roblox that’s about 21 to 27 cents. Any revenue estimate you read about someone else’s game should be adjusted the same way before it informs your plan.
Build the second product while the first one peaks. DoBig Studios licensed to Epic Games, ran a Bruno Mars concert, and optioned a film during the window when attention was cheapest to convert. Roblox is making that easier: Roblox Everywhere will let creators publish experiences as standalone apps on mobile, PC, and consoles, which turns a platform hit into something with its own distribution.
Own the audience, not the placement. KreekCraft’s subscriber list survives the game. A developer’s concurrent player count does not. The creators who last across cycles are the ones who treat each platform’s program as a channel rather than a business, which is the lesson every ambassador and rewards program eventually teaches the hard way.
The question of how much money Steal a Brainrot makes has a defensible answer, somewhere between $1.4 million and $4.4 million a month, and it is less interesting than what the answer costs to produce: a viral loop, 73.9 billion visits, and a 99% drawdown inside a single year.
