Meep City is a Roblox social game reminiscent of Club Penguin or Toontown where users hang out, decorate homes, and fulfill their slice of life fantasy. At least, that’s the pitch. In practice, Meep City has gained a reputation for being a dating spot full of underage kids cloaked in sexually charged avatars. But in late August, team behind Meep City did away with many of the mechanics that made that kind of NSFW play possible. And in doing so, it’s now gone from being the biggest game on Roblox in 2018 to barely attracting a couple of hundred people at once in 2025.
Before the update, Meep City allowed players to use custom bios as well as bespoke avatars. Neither of these features are nefarious at their core, but users took advantage of the freedom the mechanics afforded them. Older footage of the game shows how players would advertise their age alongside suggestive messages meant to attract the attention of other players. “I’m a boy but a sweetheart…f4 m3 and you’ll get the milk,” one bio in 2024 read. “aye turn me up am tryni f4” another avatar displayed. Often, these bios would tell others what the user’s age was, and what their social media handles on other websites were as well.
Roblox’s blocky avatars are somewhat limited in what they can depict, but users can get creative within those constraints. On the tamer end, Meep City would see users showing off lots of digital skin or wearing wedding dresses that signaled that the player was interested in romantic interactions. On the more extreme end, players would log onto the game with giant virtual genitalia hanging from the avatar’s lower region.
A few years after its launch in 2016, Meep City also gained a “party” feature that allowed users to invite others to their digital abodes. Inevitably, this feature deteriorated into digital orgies. News of this phenomenon hit mainstream media, which then prompted Roblox to take action against the game. Meep City was then pulled from Roblox temporarily, and later came back without the party feature. Shortly after was the first time that Meep City saw a significant drop in users.
More recently, Roblox as a platform has been catching a ton of heat thanks to a slate of lawsuits, some government-affiliated, which argue that its digital worlds do not go far enough to protect children. In response to that outcry, Roblox promised to institute security changes for the platform. In a Aug. 15 video explaining the company’s thought process for moderating its platform, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki acknowledged that he often hears people telling Roblox that it should take down games like Meep City. But, Baszucki suggested, pulling a game is seen internally as an extreme last measure.
“We always want to work with our developers first and give them an opportunity to make changes to the design and see if that works to mitigate bad behavior,” said Eliza Jacobs, a member of Roblox’s safety and civility team, in the video. Otherwise, Jacobs said, Roblox would be taking down a game because the users were behaving badly. “That would open up an abuse vector,” Jacobs explained, noting that it could then become easy for players to start campaigns against games or creators they disliked.
“That doesn’t seem fair at all,” Jacobs said.
Soon after this proverbial town hall, some Roblox games will get pulled down. Developers are reportedly being sent a questionnaire to ensure that their experiences fall within Roblox’s guidelines, and if they don’t fill it out by Sept. 30, the game could become unplayable.
A few days after Roblox explained its moderation process, Meep City underwent major changes. The game no longer allows for custom bios and avatars, which were the features that made NSFW play so prominent. And now, a couple of weeks later, the playerbase is in the pits. According to ROMonitor, Meep City went from having a concurrent player high of just over 24,000 to now only reaching a few hundred people at once. Today, on average, there are only under 150 people logged into Meep City at any given moment. The average playtime has also gone down for those who are still enjoying Meep City, according to statistics on ROMonitor.
Curiously, there’s been no explanation for why these changes were instituted. Neither Roblox nor Alex Newtron, the creator of Meep City, responded to a request for comment from Polygon. Roblox has not publicly stated that it worked with or pressured Meep City into getting rid of its controversial features, nor has Newtron made any statements to his community of users. But given the timing of the changes, alongside Roblox’s admission that it is aware of Meep City’s reputation vis a vis working with developers to make changes, one could surmise the two incidents are related. However, it is just as possible that Newtron took the initiative to rework the game himself in light of recent events.
Whatever the case, the Meep City community was hit unawares, as evidenced by screenshots of confused players floating around the day after custom features were pulled.
It’s a step in the right direction, but as a whole, Roblox is still contending with immense pressures when it comes to child safety. Beyond the government lawsuits, Roblox is also facing criticism for banning a user named Schlepp, who was known for tracking down suspected predators in Roblox. That anger is widespread enough that you can spot protestors among the few who are still playing Meep City; their usernames will say things like “free Schlepp.” And while Roblox has instituted new measures, like tech that can moderate games on the fly, it’s unlikely to stop vigilante behavior from users. If anything, the increased public scrutiny is leading to more fan-led initiatives to track down potentially problematic Roblox users.
When it comes to Meep City, its association with degenerate content arguably changed the entire trajectory of the game and how it will be remembered. In 2018, when it was still blowing up and attracting millions of users every month, Meep City was readily compared in mainstream media to games like Pokémon Go and Candy Crush in terms of impact and influence. The game was significant enough that Roblox even released Meep City action figures at the height of its fame. Its current state is a far cry from its heyday, when it was popular enough that its creator had to implement a queue to triage the sheer number of people playing.
“I grew up with meep city 😭this is so sad 😞,” one Redditor says in a thread discussing Meep City’s downfall. “Honestly I find it more fun,” another opined. “The smaller community makes it way better because it’s mostly normal people.”
