What’s a Little Beef between Royals?

By: Leanna Burch and Salaamah Chowdhury

As expected with any platform that involves online interaction, Roblox has its (more than) fair share of issues, ranging from exploitation, hacking, and plagiarism to toxic fandoms, chaotic development teams, cyberbullying, and even outright cult-like activities. These issues often happen in multiplayer games or in games that have (a) developer(s) that are heavily involved with the community, and Royale High is no exception. But before delving into the current events, it's necessary to acknowledge previous events in order to understand the significance of what’s happening now. 

Royale High is a popular and well-known roleplay and dress-up game inspired by the show Winx and made by the development team callmehbob. It was released in April 2017 and amassed over a million concurrent players during its peak around 2017-2020. In its early days,  the game was simply a place for players to dress up, roleplay, and have fun, with no major issues or controversies. However, not long after came a slow but noticeable shift in the development team and motivation behind each update.

The first signs of Royale High’s downfall became noticeable after the creator’s husband, Lance, had started getting involved in the game. Some of the results of his involvement in the game are the decline in quality of the masculine torso and the design of several sets. On top of that, the developer's husband had also mistreated other developers over the sets they had made. 

Another problematic developer (now ex-royale high developer) is Beaplays. Although her actions weren’t directly tied to Royal High, she has been involved in major controversies on other games and platforms that ended with her getting fired from the team. The incident that ended with her removal happened in another well-known dress-up game called Dress to Impress (DTI). 

On DTI, there was a livestreamed Q&A event with Lady Gaga, DTI staff, as well as winners of a contest. Beaplays, however, deliberately and repeatedly advertised the event as a meet and greet when it wasn’t. The fact that she had falsely advertised it upset a lot of fans. Beaplays did eventually post an apology, but a lot of fans felt that the apology blamed the community for not realizing it wasn’t one and that she had apologized for the sake of protecting her reputation.

Even without the involvement of these two developers, the development team still had other issues. Some of the more minor issues include the devs removing two sets (Enchanting Heirloom and Fluttering Butterfly) allegedly for ‘copyright’ reasons despite presenting nothing from anyone who’s ever worked on anything related to the Winx franchise’s complaints of plagiarized content, not even acknowledging the rework for them proposed despite the objection of many of its players. On top of that, the creator of said sets was uninformed of the removal until it had happened. The devs did end up compensating in diamonds for people who had bought the sets, but players felt it was not enough.

They had also removed two maps, Enchantix and Fantasia Hotel, with the same argument of ‘copyright claims’, without any warnings or compensation for the map removals. The developers had also delayed the release of campus 3 for so long that campus 4 ended up coming out before it. What really started sparking major backlash was several problems with a doll Royal High had made. 

For starters, Jazzwares, the company Royal High had collaborated with to make the dolls, openly donated to and supported Israel, a choice many players of the game were not happy with and have several times voiced discontent with, including major content creators. And yet, instead of trying to address the issue, stop the collaboration, or switch to another company, Royale High went on to make an entire line of dolls with Jazzwares and is still making them as of now. Another issue with the dolls was the high pricing for a doll that many players believed wasn’t worth its price. A regular, less than one-foot doll that only came with a singular outfit was being sold for at least $50, and the smaller ones for more than $20. Despite backlash, the devs refused to collaborate with another company, discontinue the dolls with the company they are currently working with, and lower their prices.

On top of overpriced dolls from a controversial company, the dolls were only available in a few locations. Instead of properly compensating or coming up with an alternative, Royale High released an in-game bingo card of some of the dolls they made, despite them being unavailable in several countries.

Despite all the issues, Royale High remained a popular game even if it didn’t have the active player count it used to. And Royale High being such a well-known game was bound to spark inspiration in other developers, which is where Monsterverse steps in. Similar to Royale High, Monsterverse is also a roleplay and dress-up game. However, it distinguishes itself from Royale High copies by basing its designs and sets off the show Monster High, similar to how Royale High was based on Winx. Monsterverse also included a tutorial and cutscene, something Royale High did not include. In addition to this, Monsterverse has several times compensated players for inconveniences, showing love and passion for their fanbase, a quality Royale High once had.

Monsterverse was originally supposed to be released during the summer of 2025, but had to be pushed to October and then pushed again to November due to development issues. Despite being a relatively new game, it proved to people that it was capable of one day becoming a real competition with Royale High. Many of the smaller developers and tons of players recognized this and proceeded to spam the report option of mature content, resulting in the AI that moderates Roblox flagging and being forced to take down Monsterverse. This forced Monsterverse to once again push back its release date to a later date in November.

Royale High still remains incapable of properly responding to their players' needs from the start of said incidents until today, through their treatment of employees, improper communication between themselves and the staff of players, a lack of compensation, and multiple delays in promised content, leading to the massive downfall that it has had. In the end, it remains a source of concern for old players who find the game nostalgic and miss the charm the game once had before expressing such problems, mourning the money and time they’ve poured into the game, the community once adored.