A small farming game reached almost as many players over the weekend as all titles on Steam combined – what’s behind it?
Be honest: Who among you didn’t secretly pick a few strawberries in Farmville on Facebook back in the day? Quickly milked the cow before the timer ran out? It was trivial, but somehow satisfying.
Almost 15 years later, we’re experiencing déjà vu: Grow a Garden, a simple farming simulation on the Roblox gaming platform, is breaking all records. On May 25, 2025, the game reached an incredible 8.9 million concurrent players That’s almost as many as Steam at the same time, which had 11.6 million concurrent players.
For comparison: PUBG: Battlegrounds holds the Steam record for simultaneous players with 3.26 million. Fortnite broke the 15.3 million mark in 2020, but that was during an in-game event.
What is Grow a Garden anyway?
The premise is actually extremely simple: You plant a piece of land, sell your harvest, invest the profits in better seeds – and repeat the whole process. Your plants continue to grow even when you’re not playing. Anyone who has ever been addicted to a mobile game will recognize the pattern immediately.
And of course, there’s also the option to progress faster using Robux, Roblox’s real-money currency. Nevertheless, the game is primarily based on a relaxed, steady flow without any pressure. It’s basically a kind of extremely shallow Stardew Valley.
To understand what’s behind the hype, we gave it a quick try ourselves. Less than five minutes into the game, we were already collecting virtual carrots and strawberries. Sounds trivial – and it is. But that’s apparently where the appeal lies. See for yourself here:
From school project to million-dollar hit
According to a interview with Game File, the viral success was originally the brainchild of an unknown teenager who started the game as a school project. But when the number of simultaneous players reached around 1,000, the professional Roblox studio Splitting Point got involved and took over further development.
Given the dizzying numbers, suspicions quickly arose that something wasn’t quite right. Financial analysts at TD Cowen initially accused Grow a Garden of being pushed into Roblox’s algorithm through bot manipulation.
But just a few days later, they backtracked: The figures were genuine. Roblox itself also confirmed to Game File that it had seen no evidence of irregularities.
Grow a Garden did not achieve its player numbers with a bombastic event or elaborate marketing. Admittedly, the often very young Roblox players are not necessarily considered gaming connoisseurs – but they clearly just enjoy playing this game. And sometimes that’s all it takes for a game to suddenly become a mass phenomenon.
