Everybody loves palpating their turnips; just look at the success of Stardew Valley and its ilk for proof of that. But it turns out people really love some vegetable action, if the staggering success of Roblox game Grow a Garden is any indication, given it’s seemingly smashed through Fortnite’s previous gargantuan record for most players at the same time.
Let’s break out some numbers. According to third-party monitoring tools (thanks Dextero), Grow a Garden – the specifics of which we’ll get to shortly – soared past 16m concurrent players this weekend on Roblox (16,411,769 to be exact. By way of comparison, Fortnite announced record-breaking concurrents of 15.3m players during its Marvel season finale event back in Covid-era 2020.
So what, you may be wondering, has garnered all this player attention? Grow a Garden is, according to its official description by developer The Garden Game, very much what it sounds like. It’s a game of buying seeds, shoving them in the ground, then waiting for your Blueberries, coconuts, daffodils etc. to grow – which they’ll happily do whether you’re in-game or offline.
After that, you can sell your massive produce for profit, purchase more seeds or temporary boosts you’ll need to slowly craft in real-time, then start the whole cycle over again. Frankly, absolutely nothing about it sounds like the sort of thing that might capture the imagination of 16m players all at once, but then I’m not a 13-year-old looking to do something mindless online with my friends after school. Also, there’re Grow a Garden pets, so maybe that’s the appeal.
As to how Grow a Garden’s impressive 16m concurrent users stacks up with other games, PUBG currently holds the Steam record for most concurrent players, coming in at a comparatively paltry 3.3m, while it’s nearest rival, Black Myth: Wukong, barely squeaks over the 2.4m player threshold. In fact, Steam itself recently saw a concurrent high of 40m players, so Grow a Garden’s 16m looks positively gargantuan for a single game.
Whether 16m players SHOULD be playing Roblox is another matter entirely, of course, given the game continues to be embroiled in controversy and scandal amid ongoing accusations of child safety failures. Developer Roblox Corporation last year announced a sweep of policy changes – including updated parental controls and the banning of social hangouts for children under 13 – in a belated effort to improve things. Currently, Roblox is being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, possibly due to reports it mislead investors by inflating player numbers, although all parties have so far declined to say why.