Case Study

$40k / Month From a Stolen Game

A coordinated network of Murder Mystery 2 clones, organised through a 1.6M-member Roblox community, generated tens of millions of visits (an estimated $40,000/month) and Roblox still hasn't caught up.

Total Visits (18 days)
~60.7M
across 10 clone instances
Clone Success Rate
60%
4/10 taken down by Roblox
Est. Monthly Earnings
$8k-$40K
from undetected clone games

Murder Mystery 2 is one of the Roblox all-time favourites, surviving a decade without players losing interest and sustaining a strong community that loves the in-game collectibles and trading dynamics. On the other hand though, with the popularity comes a community of impatient, often young players that enjoy just getting everything, whether it's real or not.

Hacks and leaks have made the source code of many old games available (source) which opened the opportunity for low effort clones and near-copies to be posted on Roblox using the leaked code. These clones were most often quickly detected and deleted by Roblox, even games with similar names but original content such as Murder Mystery V

MMV — Murder Mystery clone in-game
MMV Murder Mystery V clone game screenshot

Stolen Opportunity

Some developers used the leaked code to recreate Murder Mystery 2, but made everything from the in-game store free, or added other hacks like flying. This attracted a lot of users who are impatient or who don't know the difference.

Obtaining the weapons and skins in MM2 takes a long time, as they're intended to be collectibles. While that version stays popular and those items feel valuable, the quick and fake version has sustained popularity.

Since it was based on stolen game code, and Roblox would remove the clones, the people behind the unfair clones are using the name MMV to be less obvious to Roblox detection. The following data shows MMV clone visit counts between May 18 to June 4, 2026 (about 18 days):

Instance Total Visits Status
#1~1.78MStill active
#2~1.35MTaken down
#3~2.26MTaken down
#4~5.16MStill active
#5~11.6MStill active
#6~5.5MStill active
#7~6.0MStill active
#8~16.9MStill active
#9~7.26MTaken down
#10~2.94MTaken down
Grand Total:~60.7M

Querying one of the clones for the list of in-game purchases returns an empty list:

Response · 200 OK
{
  "developerProducts": [],
  "nextPageCursor": null
}

Whereas querying Murder Mystery 2 https://games.roblox.com/v1/games?universeIds=66654135 returns 50 developerProducts

This means they are not attempting to make users pay for in game items. If the game later gets deleted or replaced, it would anyway create a lot of frustration that would probably put the players off returning.

Bots not needed

When someone joins one of the MMV games, they are immediately prompted to join a roblox community called MMV Backup. This group currently has 1.6M+ members. This group maintains the MMV community, and times everything to try to avoid detection and maximise profits.

Playing one of the games confirms that it actually is real players in-game, at least after the initial launch.

The community comments show the pattern. On 4 Jun 2026 1:50pm, one user posted a comment:

"What happened? Why did it shutdown? this is Lwk weird y did it shut down??"

And at 4 Jun 2026 1:58pm, one user posted a comment:

"SOMEONE TELL ME IF THEY FIND A NEW ONE OR IF THEY PUT IT BACK UP. ima be in a corner TWEAKING while I wait"

Including many more, then at exactly 2pm, there was a community announcement:

Getting thousands of hearts and thumbs up reactions.

Then on the 7th June, according to comments it appeared to die out. Now joining that version of the game gives: This experience is not available because it is unrated.

According to other comments, they have just been kicked out of the servers:

"DID MMV GET BANNED ?? my mmv disconnected and when i tried to join back it was FULLY gone ..? when will it be reuploaded"

With some users saying that the reason is because they set the servers to 16+ only.

The quick buck

Based on the rate of clones being posted and successfully obtaining millions of users, and assuming that a clone earns $0.0001–$0.0005 per visit through Roblox's Daily Engagement Rewards payout and Premium Playtime payouts, the above sample (about 18 days) earned $6,000–$30,000 total, which hits somewhere around the $12,000–$50,000/month ballpark.

If we assume that there wasn't time to withdraw the money from those games that were taken down, then the amount drops by 13.76M, to ~46.94M, although that's still between $5,000–$23,500, or something like $8,000 to $40,000 / month

Disclaimer

I am not a ROBLOX developer and I have never earned money from it. The estimates are created with the help of AI

Who is behind it

The popularity of MMV is also driven by content on other platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. For example, in this video, a man with an accent that sounds Eastern European is doing a fake high pitched voice, possibly pretending to be a kid, and claiming to give free robux (the in game currency) and codes (video). A paraphrased transcript is as follows:

New code saying, murder mystery five. Why is this person sad? Somebody just put a sad emoji.

I don't want to be sad, but I'm sad because I'm getting evicted from my house and I'm going to be homeless for a bit, but everything will turn out good, I hope. But they also want to go send me to the military. I really don't want to go, but basically, let me show you guys this code right now.

In murder mystery 5, they got some new codes which give you some exclusive stuff. Let me show you guys real quick. There's the codes that you can redeem.

You can see right here. But also, if you comment down below, let me think. Three. Comment down below three. Three. Comment down below three.

If you comment down below three, I will give you bonus Robux if your comment gets zero likes. So I'm going to choose people with zero liked comments for free VIP…

Let me go ahead and do like this so you guys can see the code. Then let me go down and type it in right now. It's going to be like exclusive Godly.

It appears that adults are operating the burner accounts and social media content used to drive players to these games.

What can be done?

While Roblox does an excellent job of detecting unfair games, they're missing the mark on this one. Simply deleting the community with 1.6M+ members used to announce new versions of MMV would do a lot to cut this off, and the backup communities (e.g. MMV Reuploader with 860k+ members which seems to have the main purpose of advertising another game now)

Also if there is such a massive niche around 'admin mode' for popular games, the owner of the games themselves could consider creating separate experiences for those users who want to play like that

The obsession with admin mode in a game may also be a good starting point for marketing a game from scratch. It may be that the players care more about admin mode than the game itself.

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