A Roblox farming game made by a teenager 'in like three days' had 8.9 million players online at the same time—Steam peaked at 11.5 million across all games on the same day

All signs point to the biggest PC game of 2025 by number of players being Grow a Garden, a Roblox game launched by a teenage developer which just hit a peak player count of nearly 9 million⁠—that is to say, all logged in and actively playing the game at once.

That's almost three times more than Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, which holds the record on Steam. On May 21, gaming newsletter Game File published an investigation by Nicole Carpenter into Grow a Garden, including hands-on impressions and comments from its lead developer. At the time of Game File's report, Grow a Garden had millions of players, peaking at 5 million online at the same time the previous weekend.

According to multiple Roblox content creators and screenshots of Grow a Garden's publicly visible player count on the Roblox UI, a concerted, record-breaking event yesterday resulted in 8.9 million concurrent players in Grow a Garden. That's more people than live in New York City, and about 2.6 million away from the peak number of players in every game on Steam put together that same day. Below are some more numbers for context.

• Record highest peak concurrent users (CCU) on Steam: PUBG: Battlegrounds, 3.26 million.
• Steam peak CCU in-game on May 24, 2025: 11.6 million. Online (that is, logged into Steam but not playing): 39.2 million.
• Steam all-time peak CCUs in-game: 13.2 million, online: 41.2 million
• Fortnite all-time peak CCUs, 2020: 15.3 million
• Roblox peak CCU (across all games): ~16 million as of last week, allegedly over 17 million following yesterday's Grow a Garden record.

I was born before 2000, what is "Grow a Garden?"

It's a Roblox game where you grow a garden. Seriously, it's that simple, and it was first released on March 25. Game File compared its success to that of Farmville, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing. People really enjoy low-stakes, violence-free games where you cultivate something.

Roblox's diversity of sub-games has always reminded me of Garry's Mod, where you could amble into a server and find an entire universe of role playing, custom rules, functionally an entirely different game to what you experience otherwise, and Roblox has developed its own ecosystem of professional developers making games for it. Once upon a time, I sampled a bafflingly well-made Squid Game, uh, game in Roblox at the height of season one mania. Eh, it's a living.

Players in Grow a Garden get a plot in an instance of the game shared with a few others. It has its own sub-currency earned by selling your produce, in addition to the omnipresent, real-money purchasable Robux.

You plant your crops, sell them at a profit, and get better seeds to do it all over again. The plants keep growing when you're not there, encouraging a casual, leave and come back playstyle like a lot of mobile and idle games. There are also, naturally, Robux-gated ways to speed this all up or unlock new mechanics.

Did a kid seriously make this?

Yes, according to Janzen Madsen, owner of professional Roblox game-making studio, Splitting Point, which bought a stake in the game and took over managing it. "We partnered with the original creator around 1,000 CCU, maybe 2,000," Madsen told Game File.

The original dev still owns around "50% of the game," with another professional Roblox studio, Do Big, having a minority share in addition to Splitting Point. According to Madsen, the original dev "literally made the game in like three days," and now Grow a Garden is a behemoth phenomenon, if those concurrent player counts are to be believed.

Ok, but it's like, bots, or fake, or something, right?

It doesn't look like it, but we only have Roblox's self-reported numbers and anecdotal evidence to base that on. Roblox definitely has a nontrivial amount of bot users, but so do most games and social media platforms⁠—except for X, "The Everything App," where they got rid of all the bots.

As reported by Game File, financial research company TD Cowen made just such an accusation regarding Grow a Garden hitting the 5 million CCU mark, only to retract it a few days later.

TD Cowen cited "an enormous upsurge" of account creation in the Philippines and Indonesia in the preceding months as "circumstantial but strong evidence" pointing to bot manipulation of Roblox's discovery algorithm in Grow a Garden's favor.

While TD Cowen still says that the spike occurred as reported, it no longer alleges that it was somehow fraudulent, manipulative, or directly tied to Grow a Garden.

In the absence of a third party source of numbers like SteamDB for Steam, Roblox's own data on individual games, included on its browser, is what we have to go on⁠—the primary evidence for the 8.9 million CCU peak is screenshots of the player count on Grow a Garden's store page when the event occurred.

A Roblox company spokesperson told Game File that it did not suspect Grow a Garden's developers of anything untoward. "Grow a Garden's global success is fueled by exceptional user retention, vibrant social interactions⁠—with friends driving play⁠—and strong Robux engagement," the spokesperson said. "Our preliminary analysis confirms genuine popularity, not artificial inflation, validating the game's authentic community-driven growth."

And there is plenty of evidence out there for Grow a Garden having genuine, grassroots popularity, it's just not in major publications or even non-Roblox-centric gaming circles on YouTube and Twitch. A quick YouTube search turns up a staggering number of Grow a Garden guides with nontrivial viewer counts, while it's booming even harder on TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

I really don't know what to do with all that information. I don't play Roblox, and the only people I know who do are my friend's kids. There is a cognitive dissonance to learning that it's far more popular than any game I've ever covered or played, bigger than Elden Ring, Minecraft, Fortnite, the Beatles, and Jesus. I guess I'll just go back to enjoying the scrappy indie unknown, Baldur's Gate 3.