People Playground Malware Attack Prompts Urgent Player Warning

September 25, 2026

People Playground, the popular Steam physics sandbox built around chaotic experiments with stick figures, has been hit by malicious Workshop mods twice in the same year. The game has been available since 2019 and has attracted hundreds of thousands of Steam reviews.

Developer mestiez disabled the Steam Workshop after discovering a second malicious mod, describing the latest incident as particularly serious in an update. Players who launched the game early on 21 September have been told to take additional precautions.

Players told to stop launching the game

The immediate advice is to remove every mod from the game’s mods folder and avoid opening People Playground until the developer confirms that it is safe. Players should also run antivirus scans and carefully check their computers if they used the Workshop during the affected period.

The developer has not established exactly what the malware did. However, the reported capabilities are severe: it may delete a substantial amount of personal data, read Discord usernames and other identifying information, and publish further mods to the Steam Workshop so the infection can spread.

An earlier statement said the malware did not steal passwords, tokens, cookies or other credentials. That message was later removed, with players instead advised to change passwords for important accounts as a precaution and to invalidate any session tokens that might have been exposed.

A second malware incident in one year

People Playground also faced a malicious-mod incident in February. That earlier attack appeared to affect game files and mod lists, while the latest threat seems capable of causing much broader damage.

There is currently no confirmed explanation for why the game has been targeted or who is responsible. Mestiez has asked players not to spread rumours or speculate, stating that responsibility for the situation rests with the developer and that speculation would not help resolve it.

The warning has attracted more than 1,000 comments on Steam. Some players say they have already stopped playing and do not intend to return, while others have expressed disbelief that the game has suffered malware incidents twice.