Sawt Falasteen - Roblox's Grow a Garden explodes online video game numbers

"You could quite easily never have heard of Grow a Garden... and yet it is by some measures the biggest video game at the moment," Dom Tait, an analyst with UK firm Omdia, told AFP.

More than 21 million players connected to Grow a Garden at the same time on June 21, buying seeds to cultivate a little patch of virtual land, harvesting crops, selling their produce and nicking stuff from other players' plots.

That shattered the record held by the adrenalin-packed Fortnite, which attracted 15 million concurrent users (CCUs) during an event in late 2020 featuring characters from the Marvel universe.

"It's enormous," Tait said of Grow a Garden's success.

He said it was difficult to say categorically if the sedate farming-themed game had broken all CCU records because other platforms do not necessarily publish numbers for other hugely popular games, such as Honor of Kings.

"(But) I think we can be confident it's a record for Roblox because Roblox has given us these these figures," he said.

Roblox, which is popular with children and teenagers, was released in 2005 and is now available on almost all consoles and on mobile phones.

It has morphed into an online gaming platform -- one of the world's largest -- where players can programme their own games and try out other users' creations.

Games on the platform are free to play. Roblox makes its money through a range of revenue streams, including in-game purchases, advertising and royalty fees.

- Created in three days -

Grow a Garden appeared in late March, developed by a teenager about whom little is known.

Game development group Splitting Point Studios soon snapped up a share.

The original creator "literally made the game in, like, three days", Splitting Point CEO Janzen Madsen told specialist website Game File.

Tait says the success of Grow a Garden, with its simple graphics and basic mechanics, can be explained by its comforting nature.

"There's not much danger. There's not much threat. You just sort of go on and do things and just sort of have a gentle experience," he said.

He pointed to the satisfaction players derived from seeing their garden evolve, even when they are not connected. A bit like a real garden, only quicker.

The concept is reminiscent of Animal Crossing, a simulation of life in a village populated by cute animals that became a soothing refuge for many players during the first Covid lockdowns in 2020.

For specialist site Gamediscover, another attraction of Grow a Garden is the ease with which players can get to grips with the game -- a bonus for Roblox, which said 40 percent of the platform's users last year were under 13.

- Massive audience -

It is difficult to know exactly how much Grow a Garden has earned for its developers.

But Tait said those who created the best paid experiences received "about 70 percent" of the money spent by gamers "with Roblox taking the rest".

Roblox says on its website it paid out $923 million to developers in 2024.

"It is big money. So there's a little bit of nervousness in the industry about, 'Is Roblox taking away the audience that would otherwise have spent hundreds of pounds on a console and bought my console games?'"

These sums demonstrate the weight in the video game industry of behemoths like Roblox and Fortnite, which have recently peaked at 350 and 100 million monthly players respectively.

"Both places provide a massive audience -- as large as any single console platform audience -- and they provide awesome opportunities for creators," Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Fortnite publisher Epic Games, told The Game Business website.

Beyond its success, Roblox has also come in for criticism.

US investment research firm Hindenburg Research published a report in 2024 accusing the platform of inflating its monthly active player count and not sufficiently protecting users from sexual predators.

In response, Roblox rejected Hindenburg's "financial claims" as "misleading" and said on its investor relations website it had "a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent malicious or harmful activity".

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