How Grow a Garden on Roblox Crushed Fortnite and Steam Records
- Stephen Dypiangco
- 15 hours ago
- 5 min read
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By Ken Bryan
Grow a Garden has quickly become the most-played game on Roblox, topping the charts with millions of daily users across PC, mobile, and console. Averaging concurrent player counts that far exceed even the platform’s top 10 games, it has evolved from a simple farming simulator built in just a few days by a teenager into a viral phenomenon.
The transformation didn’t happen by accident. After being acquired by Splitting Point Studios and partnered with Do Big Studios, two powerhouse teams responsible for some of Roblox’s biggest hits, Grow a Garden underwent a strategic overhaul in LiveOps, community engagement, and monetization. The result? On June 14, 2025 the game hit a record-breaking 16.4 million concurrent players (CCUs), a milestone that helped Roblox surpass 25 million total CCUs for the first time in its history, with Grow a Garden alone accounting for more than 65% of all Roblox players at that moment.
To put that in perspective: Grow a Garden’s individual peak is over 5x higher than PUBG: Battleground’s all-time record on Steam (3.2M CCUs), and even higher than Fortnite’s peak of 14.3 million during a major IP-backed event. In fact, Grow a Garden’s CCU count is nearly equal to the combined peaks of Steam’s top 10 games. It’s a clear signal that Roblox is no longer just a youth-focused sandbox; it’s now a global gaming platform capable of outperforming the gaming industry’s most iconic titles.
In this article, we’ll explore how Grow a Garden came to be, break down its core gameplay loop, and analyze what its explosive success signals for Roblox and the future of user-generated gaming.
How Grow a Garden Took Root on Roblox
The GameDiscoverCo newsletter did a great job detailing the game’s origins, even interviewing Janzen Maden, CEO of one of the studios that helped scale it. Essentially, Grow a Garden began as a modest farming simulator, built by a teenager (BMWLux) in just a few days. At the time, the game was averaging around 1,000 concurrent players when it started getting noticed.
That changed when Janzen, CEO of Splitting Point Studios, got involved and ultimately acquired the experience. His studio, best known for Gunfight Arena, A Dusty Trip, and Wacky Wizards, has amassed over 13 billion visits across its portfolio.
Soon after, Do Big Studios, another Roblox powerhouse with over 4 billion visits, joined as a partner. These studios are known for acquiring high-potential games and scaling them into massive hits through expert development, monetization, and marketing.
With their combined experience, Grow a Garden was revamped from the ground up. It was meticulously optimized for Roblox’s algorithm, with strong retention hooks and engagement mechanics baked in. Weekly updates and event-driven content drops became central to its success, rapidly iterated based on community feedback.
Inside the Grow a Garden Core Loop: Why It Works
At its core, Grow a Garden is a farming simulator built on a clean, satisfying gameplay loop: plant seeds, harvest crops, earn in-game currency (“Sheckles”), and reinvest in your garden to scale up.
Players begin with a small patch of land and a few seeds, but quickly unlock new crops, tools, animals, and territory. Over time, their gardens grow into sprawling, high-efficiency farms, each one personalized, optimized, and proudly displayed to others. It’s a formula that balances creativity, progression, and visible achievement. The concept is simple, and far from new, but its execution hits all the right notes for Roblox’s audience.
One standout mechanic is offline progression. Even when players log off, their crops continue to grow. When they return, they’re greeted with a fresh harvest ready to collect and sell. While the mechanic is simple, it’s rare on Roblox and powerful. Unlike many simulator games on the platform, which require you to remain logged in, Grow a Garden rewards players for stepping away. This added layer helps drive retention by giving players a sense of progress and accomplishment upon return.
Another major differentiator is the game’s strong community and consistent weekly updates. These aren’t just minor patches or small content drops, they’re full-blown content updates that inject new gameplay mechanics, rare items, high-value crops, and modifiers that impact player progression. Many updates include limited-time live events with unique challenges, rotating shops, or world-changing mechanics that create urgency and excitement.
What makes these events so successful isn’t just the content, but the urgency they create. With limited-time rotating shops, modifiers, plants, and cosmetics, players are incentivized to check in frequently or risk missing out. That urgency and excitement fuels spikes in engagement and explains how Grow a Garden consistently dominates CCU charts.
Let’s look at just how successful these updates have been over the last 30 days:
Average Saturday CCU Peak (Update Day): 8.1 million CCUs
Average Sunday-Friday CCU Peak: 2.8 million CCUs
Saturday peaks are roughly 195% higher on average compared to non-update days
Together, these systems form the backbone of Grow a Garden’s success, simple to start, endlessly engaging, and perfectly tuned for Roblox’s evolving player base.
The Breakout Moment: Success at Scale
Grow a Garden is officially the most-played game in Roblox’s history based on CCU's, regularly pulling in 2 million+ concurrent players, far outpacing the 100K-500K range typical of the platform’s other top 10 games.
According to Creator Exchange, it ranks #1 in both revenue and total playtime over the past 30 days. That momentum culminated on June 14, 2025 when Grow a Garden hit 16.4 million concurrent players, setting a new all-time Roblox record. That single-game surge helped push the platform itself past 25 million total CCUs for the first time ever, with Grow a Garden alone accounting for more than 65% of all players on Roblox at that moment.
To put that in perspective:
It’s more than 5x the all-time peak of PUBG: Battlegrounds on Steam (3.2M CCUs)
It’s peak CCUs nearly matched the combined all-time peaks of Steam’s top 10 games (16.4M vs. 16.5M)
It surpassed the entire Steam platform’s CCUs (in-game) on the same day (June 15)
And it even exceeded Fortnite’s all-time record of 14.3 million concurrent players
Unlike Fortnite, which often leans on major IP crossovers, from Marvel and Star Wars to concerts with artists like Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, Grow a Garden drives massive engagement without any external brand support. There are no licensed skins, movie tie-ins, or celebrity appearances, just original content built entirely within the Roblox ecosystem.
With each new update, Grow a Garden proves that a UGC-native Roblox experience can rival, and in some cases outperform, the biggest games in the world.
What it Means for Roblox's Future
Grow a Garden didn’t succeed because it was flashy or IP-backed. It succeeded because it deeply understood the Roblox ecosystem, what players want, how the algorithm rewards engagement, and how to keep a community active.
Offline progression, frequent live events, and weekly content drops have built one of the stickiest gameplay loops in Roblox history. But more importantly, the game reflects a broader shift in Roblox development: from solo devs building passion projects to fully staffed studios treating Roblox as a legitimate game platform.
We’re seeing the rise of large teams, analytics-driven design, and long-term LiveOps strategies. Roblox is no longer just a platform for kids, it’s becoming one of gaming’s most powerful ecosystems for reaching massive, global audiences.
Grow a Garden didn’t just raise the bar; it redefined what success looks like on Roblox. And if this is the new standard, traditional gaming developers and platforms alike need to take notice.
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