Be truthful: Who here didn’t quietly gather a few strawberries in Farmville on Facebook back in the day? Hastily milked the cow before the timer expired? It was simple, yet somehow fulfilling.
Nearly 15 years later, we’re witnessing déjà vu: Grow a Garden, a straightforward farming simulation on the Roblox gaming platform, is shattering records. On May 25, 2025, the game achieved an astounding 8.9 million concurrent players. That’s nearly as many as Steam concurrently had at that moment, with 11.6 million players online.
For context: PUBG: Battlegrounds sets the record on Steam for simultaneous players at 3.26 million. Fortnite surpassed the 15.3 million threshold in 2020, but that was during a special in-game event.
What exactly is Grow a Garden?
The concept is quite straightforward: You cultivate a plot of land, sell your crops, reinvest the earnings in superior seeds – and repeat the cycle. Your plants keep growing even when you’re not logged in. Anyone who has ever become hooked on a mobile game will instantly recognize the formula.
Furthermore, there’s the option to advance more quickly by using Robux, Roblox’s real-money currency. Nonetheless, the game fundamentally revolves around a calm, consistent rhythm without any stress. It’s essentially a very simplified version of Stardew Valley.
To grasp what’s driving the excitement, we gave it a quick try ourselves. Within less than five minutes of gameplay, we were already gathering virtual carrots and strawberries. It sounds trivial – and it is. But that’s seemingly where the charm exists. Check it out for yourself here:
From school project to multi-million hit
According to an interview with Game File, the viral success was initially conceived by an unknown teenager who developed the game as a school project. However, when the number of simultaneous players hit approximately 1,000, the professional Roblox studio Splitting Point became involved and took over the further development.
Given the staggering numbers, suspicions quickly emerged that something was off. Financial analysts at TD Cowen initially claimed that Grow a Garden had been boosted in Roblox’s algorithm through bot manipulation.
However, just a few days later, they retracted: The numbers were authentic. Roblox itself also confirmed to Game File that it found no evidence of irregularities.
Grow a Garden didn’t reach its player counts through a grand event or intricate marketing. While it’s true that the often very young Roblox players aren’t typically regarded as gaming aficionados – they clearly just enjoy this game. And sometimes, that’s all it takes for a game to unexpectedly become a mainstream sensation.
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