Citing issues with Roblox cheaters, Easy.gg, the development team behind two of the most platform’s most popular games, announced August 13 that it has decided to pull its newest battle royale game, Rift Royale, from the metaverse platform.
In a statement shared via Discord and first reported by the Roblox_RTC Twitter account, a Discord user named Liam explained the surprise closure in an announcement titled “Rift prototype is closed.”
“Sadly, Rift doesn’t work on Roblox,” the statement reads. “We spent a lot of effort trying to work within Roblox’s restrictions to create an awesome competitive game. Unfortunately what we want to do isn’t possible on Roblox. Roblox forces us to choose between having cheaters or being laggy. We’re going to focus on building games everyone can enjoy.”
Rift Royale, a battle royale game inspired by Fortnite, launched in May and entered a public beta in June. During its time on Roblox, the game amassed more than 76,000 likes and 21 million visits. However, cheaters also flocked to the game. A Google search shows numerous companies advertising hacks for the game, including aimbot and wall hack scripts.
This is the second time the development team, known for the hit Roblox games BedWars and Islands, has chosen to remove one of its games from the platform. Earlier this year, it added Prop Hunt to Roblox before shutting it down just a few weeks after its launch. In that case, the team did not cite cheating, instead simply saying the developers were unhappy with the game itself.
Regardless, Roblox developers’ fight to address cheating in their games appears to be an ongoing issue. Easy.gg’s challenges with handling cheaters echo the sentiments of Hutch, a Roblox developer who recently shared their frustration in attempting to build a competitive game on the platform.
“It is exhausting and demoralising dealing with exploiters all the time,” Hutch shared via the Roblox Developer Forums earlier this month. “The enjoyment I get out of developing games on Roblox doesn’t even start to outweigh the burnout myself and my moderation teams suffer through.”
If Roblox wants to shed its identity as a platform for only kids, developers’ struggles to develop serious competitive games on the platform may pose a problem. As children who play video games grow older and learn to handle competitive play, they frequently become more interested in multiplayer competitive games. While they expect an even playing field when competing with their peers, hackers can quickly spoil what might otherwise be an excellent gaming experience. As a result, players may move on to competitive multiplayer games with fewer hacking issues, such as Fortnite.
Further, even if developers can solve the cheating problem within their games, it’s not a viable solution if it causes the game itself to perform sub-optimally. Any anti-cheat measures that cause a game to perform poorly will frustrate the playerbase with glitches, shots that fail to register, crashes, and many other issues.
Roblox has not specifically weighed in on this issue. However, the company is continuously pushing updates to address exploits like the recent autoban exploit, which caused innocent players to lose access to their accounts just by visiting certain Roblox games.
It’s a big ask for Roblox’s internal team to manage cheaters in a way that can account for every use case in its 40 million games. Regardless, it may be time for the company to reevaluate its internal systems for managing cheaters and exploiters. Roblox could invest in more sophisticated developer tools, additional precautions against duplicate accounts, or other measures. Ultimately, ensuring competitive integrity would allow older players to better connect with the platform.
While Rift Royale may be gone, there are still plenty of great Roblox games to try. Our list of the best Roblox games in 2022 includes some of our favorites, and if you’re using the platform anyway, you might want to check out our Roblox promo codes list for August and get some new music with our Roblox music codes for August.