Meccha Chameleon is kinda like prop hunt, the hide-and-seek video game mode born out of Garry’s Mod. In prop hunt, players inhabit random game assets set about in a scene. Meccha Chameleon forces you to blend into them. You use MS Paint-like tools to hide yourself right in the open. It was an instant hit. The two-person development team sold 15 million copies within its first month. Meccha Chameleon‘s all-time concurrent player peak is just over 340,000. The number has since dropped to around 100,000 concurrent players, but it remains a top game on Steam, the only place it was published.
But the success of the game is somewhat a curse. Near-exact clones—albeit a bit sloppy—almost immediately started popping up on both Roblox and Fortnite, where players make and publish their own games. The playerbase of those Roblox clones now surpass Meccha Chameleon‘s current concurrent numbers, according to data from Reddit user RoWatcher. Games like Paint and Seek!, Paint or Seek, Paint to Hide, Paint or Die, and more than a dozen other copycats have amassed, in some cases, tens of thousands of players each.
Most of these games can slot in for one another, but the current Meccha Chameleon clone is [BACKROOMS] Chameleon!, which has nearly 50,000 concurrent players at the time of writing. Another, Paint Or Seek, has 37,000 concurrent players. A bunch of other clones sit around one or two thousand players.
Though Meccha Chameleon is just $6, Paint or Seek is free. It’s on a platform that millions of people use daily, accessible on a smartphone. A lot of the people on the Roblox platform—kids, really—may not even know Meccha Chameleon exists; they see a game getting popular on the platform, and they play it with their friends. There are always developers looking to capitalize on that. Of course there are things to buy in these Meccha Chameleon clones, like coins which, in turn, let you purchase key tools, like an eyedropper to match colors, which is how these developers make money.
It’s not really clear if these sorts of games are against Roblox’s rules. Roblox is built off this sort of “inspiration”—games that are copies of Steam or console games, and games that are copies of each other. The company benefits too. Kotaku has reached out to Roblox for comment.
The Steam to Roblox knock-off pipeline
There are a lot of clones on Roblox, but there seems to be an influx of games—particularly friendslop games—like these popping up. R.E.P.O, Peak, Lethal Company, and Among Us all have ugly siblings on Roblox. This month, there’s a second Steam viral hit on the Roblox top charts, Clean the Library, inspired by Steam hit Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library. Now just over 7,000 people are playing the Steam original. Meanwhile, twenty-six thousand are on the Roblox game. Clean the Library has reached a peak of 83,591 players, and has amassed 70 million visits. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library sold 1 million copies, developer ArtRising announced in June. (There are other copies, but Clean the Library is the most popular.)
The premise of the game is simple, which makes it perfect for Roblox. Books are strewn about in a library, and you must clean it up. It scratches that same sort of itch that a game like Powerwash Simulator does. It feels good to put things in their place, to organize endlessly. In the Roblox version, which looks quite similar to the original, you can clean the library with friends—another draw. And like with Paint or Seek, it’s free, on a platform that kids are already playing on.
Joseph Drennan, a Roblox developer who helped create Clean the Library, told Kotaku via email that the team was inspired by Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library. (It says it on the Roblox page, too.) He said he doesn’t like thinking about Clean the Library as “more successful” than the original game. “I’m grateful for the inspiration, but at this point I think the games have gone in different directions and offer different experiences,” Drennan said. “I’m just happy people have enjoyed what our team at Retro Shrimp has created.”
There are, indeed, several differences, like multiplayer, but the overall design and gameplay feel similar to that of Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library.
“I think a big reason our game has been successful is that it’s free and built around playing with friends,” Drennan said. “A lot of people use it as a way to just turn their brain off and relax. It’s kind of like hopping on a phone call with friends while having something fun to do in the background. That combination has really resonated with players.”
Like Paint and Seek and the others, Clean the Library has monetization. These are upgrades that help you clean the library faster.
Monetizing clones and the limits of copyright protection
The success of Clean the Library means that other cleaning games have also proliferated—set in supermarkets, toy stores, museums, bakeries, a shop selling dumpling squishies. Copies of the alleged copy, as it were. Interestingly enough, both Clean the Library and some of the Meccha Chameleon clones are open about being inspired by other games. It’s listed right on the bottom of their Roblox pages. At best, these are good-faith attempts to give credit where credit is due. At worst, it’s an attempt to gain goodwill despite the similarities.
Game makers have filed lawsuits against this sort of thing in the past, but usually it’s Roblox creator versus Roblox creator. By 2025, more than half a dozen of these suits were filed across the U.S. Often, they’re settled out of court or otherwise dismissed, so it’s hard to say how cases like these would play out legally. Adam Starr, general counsel for Grow A Garden publisher Do Big Studios, said copyright law doesn’t protect “game concepts or genres,” just “the original creative expressions of those ideas.”
“So the fact that two works share similar concepts or gameplay does not, by itself, establish copyright infringement,” Starr said. “Take the game of chess. The concept of chess isn’t protected. But Nintendo could create a Mario-themed chess set in which Mario is the king, Princess Peach is the queen, and so on. Copyright would protect Nintendo’s original artistic expressions, like the unique characters, but it doesn’t prevent others from creating their own chess games using different original artwork.”
He continued: “But whether a particular work infringes another, like two adaptations of a hide-and-seek style game, depends on an analysis of the expressive elements of the respective works. The fact that one work discloses that it is ‘inspired’ by another doesn’t change the analysis. “
Platforms like these are blurring the lines of what’s iterative and what’s theft. Roblox is built around and profits from the iterative game development process, so there’s very little incentive for the company to do much to close up the “Steam best-seller to Roblox hit” pipeline.
