By Saddiq Basha
The re-enactment of real-world mass casualty attacks on Roblox has become a recognised phenomenon within the True Crime Community (TCC)—a multi-layered online fandom that valorises perpetrators of mass violence regardless of ideology, ranging from those who consume and discuss such content to those who, at the extreme, seek to emulate them.
Such experiences, however, do not emerge ex nihilo. Among the actors behind them are loosely organised collectives that style themselves as ‘game studios.’ These TCC-affiliated collectives develop, reupload, and circulate Roblox recreations of mass casualty attacks to a dedicated following. Such studios have only recently drawn scrutiny, with one group documented as producing detailed and disturbing recreations of real tragedies, including the 1999 Columbine and 2022 Uvalde shootings. While such recreations underscore legitimate concerns about the content’s role in normalising violent reconstructions of real tragedies as entertainment, and the desensitisation that follows, the focus here is on the operational resilience of the studios behind it. Drawing on a case study of one studio—its name omitted here—whose content was found circulating within TCC Telegram groups in Southeast Asia, this article examines how such groups sustain their operations despite repeated moderation, continuing to produce mass casualty experiences, coordinating followers around multiplayer gameplay, and monetising their content.
Producing and Reposting Through the Bans
The studio in question operates primarily through a Telegram channel formed on January 1, 2026, which by February had slightly over 2,000 subscribers. Run by several administrators, the channel was dedicated to uploading TCC games and updates, in the form of screenshots, of experiences currently in development. It operates alongside a companion Telegram chat group where more active users converse freely, trade edits glorifying mass casualty perpetrators and post gore content, including livestream footage of mass shootings and Islamic State execution footage. Based on in-group conversations, the chat group, in particular, appears to be the latest re-established iteration after several bans, a sign of how readily these groups reconsolidate.
On the main channel, administrators post a steady stream of mass-shooting Roblox experiences, including reuploads of content from other banned collectives and from active adjacent ones. The posts typically follow a set template. Each names a specific attack, whether explicitly or through a euphemistic title, then links to a Roblox profile the user must add to gain access, credits the uploader and developer, and notes whether the experience remains active or has been banned. The linked profiles are typically burner accounts, each hosting at least one TCC-related experience published to a friends-only audience, what Roblox terms a “limited” experience.
This friends-only setup is a key mechanism of the Studio’s resilience. It allows administrators to vet entrants by friend requests, lowering the risk of detection and suspension, and, unlike public experiences, it requires no identity verification of the publishing account, only an age check and an account at least two days old, so a banned account can be replaced swiftly.
Beyond distributing others’ work, the administrators are active developers themselves. One announced a return from hiatus, citing school and personal commitments—a passing detail that points to the relative youth of those running these operations—and promised an experience based on the 2011 Utøya attack, The same administrator had previously released recreations of the 2022 Buffalo shooting, a white-supremacist attack, and the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, carried out by an Islamic State supporter, an ideological range typical of the TCC’s indiscriminate fixation on mass violence.
A Self-Sustaining Community
Community engagement, however, extends well beyond passive consumption. During development, administrators build anticipation, or ‘hype,’ with beta gameplay footage and leaks, and run polls to gauge interest. One asked followers which attack to upload next, listing options such as Christchurch and Buffalo, and drew 149 votes. They also organise periodic mass events, announcing a designated experience, time, and access details on the channel so that followers enter the same server simultaneously for group play.
A TikTok post shared in the Telegram group chat captures one such event, built on a recreation of the 2024 Crocus City Hall attack by Islamic State Khorasan. In the footage, around six players enter a recreation of the venue and open fire on civilian non-player characters (NPCs) beneath an on-screen countdown to the arrival of the police. When the game then prompts them to either kill the responding officers or die by suicide, the players choose the latter, and the footage closes on a final kill count. The clip therefore offers a glimpse of how these events are organised, and of how readily real-world atrocities are gamified and consumed as shared entertainment.
Importantly, such community engagement, whether through follower input on the next project or shared group gameplay, underlines the social element of the collective’s resilience. It reveals that a committed, coordinated following is what reassembles around each new account or group after a ban, making the community, rather than any single account, the operation’s most durable asset.
Monetisation
The Studio also monetises its content, if modestly, through two distinct mechanisms. The first, an “Early Access” scheme, requires users to purchase a plain virtual t-shirt from an affiliated Roblox storefront for 179 Robux (around USD 0.63) and to send an administrator a screenshot as proof, in return for perks such as gameplay leaks, game files, input into future subjects, and entry into Robux giveaways.
The second is the sale of individual experience files through Roblox passes, one-time purchases that unlock privileges within an experience. To buy one, users are directed to an account hosting a placeholder experience whose storefront lists passes named after specific attacks, deliberately misspelled to evade moderation and priced between 167 and 334 Robux (between USD 0.58 and 1.17). The files are released over Telegram only once the buyer submits proof of purchase.
The returns are likely small. Roblox sets a 30,000-Robux floor before creators can cash out into real currency, well beyond this operation’s reach, so earnings probably stay within the platform’s economy, recycled as giveaways or reinvested into sustaining their operations on the platform.
Conclusion
Rather than merely cataloguing what TCC-affiliated game studios produce, the focus of this article has been on the cross-platform tactics that sustain them. The case study shows how one such group exploits Roblox’s ecosystem, leveraging burner accounts, friends-only experiences and the platform’s internal economy to produce and disseminate mass casualty experiences while evading moderation. Crucially, that resilience is not merely technical but communal, and enforcement must address both. Closing the platform gaps they exploit would make persistence harder, but a coordinated following will simply regroup around new accounts and platforms. As a recent ISD policy paper argues, ad-hoc account removal has done little to hinder adaptive, constantly evolving subcultures. The more promising path treats the community, not the account, as the unit of disruption: intelligence-led, cross-platform enforcement that anticipates regrouping rather than reacting to it one account at a time.
Saddiq Basha is a Senior Analyst at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research examines far-right extremism in digital spaces, with a focus on violent online communities and subcultures in Southeast Asia, analysing their ideologies, networks, and activities.