It’s hard to deny the success of Roblox Grow A Garden. No, seriously, it’s absolutely hard to deny. The game may have started out as “just another game” in the creator-driven universe, but it soon exploded into something that set records for how many gamers were playing it at once. At one point, it was doing better than every other game in the title’s universe COMBINED! That’s not something that just happens. It’s also something that doesn’t go unnoticed, including going unnoticed by the game’s CEO, David Baszucki, who did an interview with TechStuff that featured him talking about the game’s success:
“We’ve worked really hard over the last I’d say year and a half to make our discovery system very fair, very organic, and a discovery system that if someone creates something that is retaining well causing viral growth, people are spending a lot of time in it, that experience will get more exposure. Grow a Garden is a great example. That creator created this idea of something that was new and interesting. It’s asynchronous. Things happen when you’re not playing. You can come back, which is really cool. They launched it in the same way we launched Roblox with a little bit of paid traffic to get some initial users playing, but it got picked up by our discovery algorithms and over time went viral to the point where a couple weeks ago, I believe it hit 11 million concurrent players, which is close to the all time concurrent records for games anywhere around the world.”
That actually tells you how long ago this interview was because, in point of fact, Roblox Grow A Garden had 21 million people playing it at once a few Saturdays ago when the “Summer Update” launched. It helped raise the overall concurrent player rate to 30+ million people at one point, setting another record. Oh, and yes, that means this gardening game has an all-time record for most people playing it at once.
Now, we WILL say that the CEO’s words about “organic growth” have come under fire, especially since there are some who claim that it wasn’t exactly “organic” and that the dev team kind of “rigged the system” so that more people would play this game. When you think about how THIS title is the only one to have had “such exponential growth,” you can see why they might say that.
Even still, the game has a large fan base, and that highlights how much of a success it is.
