The Copycat Effect: How R.E.P.O. Clone E.R.P.O. Became a Viral Hit on Roblox
- Stephen Dypiangco
- Apr 15
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 17
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By Ken Bryan
Over the past week, E.R.P.O. has emerged as one of Roblox’s fastest-rising experiences, climbing to the top of the Top Trending and Up and Coming charts. It also recently cracked the Top 100 Earning games on the platform and continues to gain momentum. On the surface, it’s a fun and goofy physics-driven co-op horror game. But a closer look at its name and gameplay loop, reveals it borrowing heavily from R.E.P.O., one of the most-played games on Steam right now.
This is not new territory for Roblox. The platform has become a launchpad for developers to reinterpret successful games from the broader gaming ecosystem. E.R.P.O. is a textbook example of how Roblox developers are taking proven mechanics from hit games on other platforms and recreating them in ways that feel native to Roblox. The result is an experience that is accessible, social, and uniquely suited to the platform’s younger audience.
To understand why E.R.P.O. is striking a chord with players, let’s break down what’s driving the game’s rise.
E.R.P.O. Setup: Stealth, Scavenging, and Survival
E.R.P.O. is a physics-based co-op horror game where players team up to retrieve valuable items from hostile environments. The goal is to gather enough loot to meet a sales quota, all while avoiding unpredictable enemies and surviving the extraction.
Each item must be carefully grabbed, carried and deposited into the cart without breaking. Colliding with walls, teammates, or objects can damage the item and reduce its value. This adds a layer of slapstick tension to every run, as players juggle stealth, teamwork, and precision under pressure.
E.R.P.O. by the Numbers: What’s Driving Success
Despite its relatively recent launch, the game’s stats illustrate how it’s building impressive momentum.
Lifetime visits: 52M visits to date (with at least 3 million visits daily since the weekend lift, indicating sustained user engagement)
Average session length: 10.76 minutes (which is around the average global session length)
Rating: 95.8% Like rating, signaling strong player satisfaction
Revenue ranking: Currently 75th among top-grossing games and has been steadily rising since the weekend lift
E.R.P.O.’s monetization is cleverly integrated into the free-to-play game loop, designed to reduce friction, enhance survivability, and expand replayability.
Monetization Features:
Revives: 9 Robux to revive, scaling to 29 Robux after first use. This low initial cost acts as a behavioral hook, encouraging players to lean on revives early then capitalize on urgency once they’re already invested in the run. It’s a classic freemium tactic, modest at first, but ramps up precisely when players are most invested.
Shop Refresh: 9 Robux to re-roll in-game shop that has different character and environment upgrades
Class Unlocks: Players can purchase new classes, each class offering unique gameplay advantages
Game Passes: Includes lobby size expansion, stamina, and health boosts
Bolts: Earned or purchased in-game currency used for cosmetics
What Makes E.R.P.O. Click on Roblox
So why is E.R.P.O. working?
It’s a clone of R.E.P.O you can play for free
First and foremost, it’s a familiar concept wrapped in a more accessible format. On Steam, R.E.P.O. sells for $9.99, not a steep price, but still a barrier. On Roblox, E.R.P.O. is completely free to play. Anyone can jump in instantly with friends and try it out, no upfront commitment required. In fact, ItzVexo, a popular Roblox YouTuber, directly calls out in their video that E.R.P.O. is essentially a free version of R.E.P.O. available on Roblox.
Horror games are having a moment
Second, horror is a fast growing genre on Steam. To put its growth in perspective, in 2024 alone, 2,627 horror games were released, up from 1,622 the year prior, a 62% year-over-year increase. For comparison, horror genre growth had averaged just 23% annually over the previous three years. That spike reflects a growing appetite for tension-driven, multiplayer-friendly experiences.
Recent hits like Sons of the Forest and Lethal Company prove that co-op horror, in particular, is resonating with players. Funnily enough, E.R.P.O. may be a clone of R.E.P.O., but R.E.P.O. itself is heavily inspired by Lethal Company, the surprise co-op horror hit that took over Steam in late 2023. In a way E.R.P.O. is a game within a game within a game - like a genre version of Inception, each layer borrows from the last, reinterpreting the same core loop.
Social co-opetition is emerging on Roblox
This speaks to a broader trend on Roblox itself. Social co-opetition, games where players must collaborate to solve a task, has been identified by Roblox as one of the highest-demand genres across its ecosystem. E.R.P.O. nails that formula. Its physics-driven systems, unpredictable enemies, and proximity chat make for emergent moments that are both terrifying and hilarious, exactly the kind of gameplay that thrives on TikTok and YouTube.
Sticky by Design
The final piece of the puzzle is tone. E.R.P.O. balances genuine suspense with absurdity. The horror is there, but it’s softened by the physics chaos, voice chat meltdowns, and low-stakes experimentation. That blend of tension and goofiness is what makes the game sticky and what gives it breakout potential within Roblox’s unique social environment.
The Copycat Effect: From PC to Roblox
E.R.P.O. is not an isolated case. Over the last few years, Roblox has become a fast-moving clone machine for popular games, especially those emerging from the PC space. When a new game goes viral on platforms like Steam or Epic, it’s often just a matter of weeks before a version appears on Roblox. And it’s rarely alone. For every breakout hit, dozens of copycat experiences flood the platform in rapid succession.
We’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly:
Imposter is a clear homage to Among Us, the viral social deduction that exploded during the pandemic. Imposter clicked with Roblox’s younger audience and has racked up over 177 million visits
Chained has 218 million visits, mimicking the challenge mechanics and co-op chaos of Chained Together, a title that gained traction through Twitch virality
Island Royale is Roblox’s take on Fortnite with over 432 M visits. While Fortnite introduced fast-paced battle royale gameplay to mainstream, Island Royale gave Roblox players a chance to try that same format with lower device requirements
The pattern is clear: A unique, breakout game rises on PC → dozens of Roblox clones appear → one or two experiences emerge as viral hits
Some of these experiences are near one-to-one clones. Others take creative liberties, reimagining the core gameplay to better match Roblox’s player behavior, visual language, and pacing. Regardless of fidelity, the speed and volume of these adaptations reflect just how quickly Roblox creators can respond to cultural momentum.
The Bigger Picture: UGC, Speed, and Platform Power
While E.R.P.O. is compelling on its own, it also reflects a broader shift: Roblox is becoming a mirror and amplifier of the wider gaming industry. Thanks to its UGC ecosystem, gameplay trends, genres, and mechanics that typically originate on PC are now showing up on Roblox with increasing speed and frequency.
What makes this shift important is access and agility. Roblox developers can build, test, and launch games faster than traditional studios or indie developers, without the need for large teams, publisher support, or long production times. A game that might take a year or more to build for PC can be cloned and reimagined on Roblox in a matter of weeks.
Take R.E.P.O for example. It launched on Steam on February 26, 2025. Just one month later, E.R.P.O. was live on Roblox. This kind of turnaround is almost unheard of in traditional game development.
What sets Roblox apart isn’t just speed, it’s its accessibility. Games that would normally require high-end PCs or upfront payments are instantly accessible, for free, by anyone with a Roblox account. In that sense, Roblox is not just a development platform, it’s a distribution engine. It takes what’s trending elsewhere and makes it instantly playable, for free, by a global audience.
And this isn’t just about cloning viral games. The most successful developers on Roblox remix, reshape, and take inspiration from hit games and build experiences that feel tailored for Roblox’s ecosystem. They lean into emergent gameplay, chaotic systems, and the kind of social stickiness that fuels virality across TikTok, YouTube, and Discord.
For developers, publishers, and brands, this trend is worth watching closely. It’s not just that Roblox reflects what’s working elsewhere, it’s increasingly where genre innovation starts.
What Comes Next
Will E.R.P.O. become a long-term success within Roblox, or will it follow the pattern of other breakout experiences that fade just as fast as they rise? Many games in the copycat category surge on momentum, then struggle to retain attention once the novelty wears off, especially if their inspiration starts to lose steam. The answer depends on how well the developers evolve the experience and keep players engaged beyond the initial hook.
But regardless of E.R.P.O.’s longevity, the trend it represents is not going away.
In UGC gaming, cloning viral games isn’t a risky, years-long investment. It’s agile. A single developer or small team can recreate a game on Roblox in a fraction of the time with little to no cost and launch it to an audience of over 86 million daily active users. Even a modest success can pull in millions of visits and become profitable overnight.
One hit spawns dozens of imitations, and a few inevitably rise to the top. Even when a copycat is taken down for IP infringement, another version often appears shortly after. It’s a “whack-a-mole” dynamic that’s baked into the UGC ecosystem: The speed of creation and the volume of clones makes enforcement nearly impossible and for many developers, the incentive to act quickly outweighs the risk of being removed.
This behavior isn’t unique to Roblox. The same copycat dynamics are visible in Fortnite’s Creative Maps, albeit a smaller scale.
In fact, if you browse Roblox’s top games by total visits, it’s easy to see just how many are influenced by popular titles from other platforms. These connections are in plain sight, with experiences borrowing names, themes, and game mechanics that players already recognize. It’s not a fringe behavior; it’s a growing trend in the UGC ecosystem on Roblox.
That raises important questions: could PC developers eventually begin building Roblox-first versions of their own games to reach younger, social-first players? Could we see a world where developers launch games on both Roblox and PC storefronts simultaneously to maximize reach?
It might sound far-fetched, but E.R.P.O. is just the latest reminder that the distance between Roblox and other platforms is shrinking. And Roblox, with its user-friendly dev tools and massive player base, is becoming a proving ground for the next wave of genre innovation.
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