The Roblox game Grow a Garden reached over five million players on May 17, passing the previous record set by Blox Fruits. According to the website Rolimons, the previous highest peak was just under 2.8 million. Grow a Garden was running a Chicken Zombie event, which seems to be a play on the Minecraft chicken jockey, when they hit five million players.
Grow a Garden has been popular lately, so it’s not surprising to see them hit high numbers, but one does have to wonder if botting played a role. Looking at the past week, their daily peak player counts hit anywhere from 1.3 million to 1.5 million. To some extent, the event and a push in Discord likely encouraged the new player peak of five million.
The developer who goes by Jandel celebrated the record on Twitter, stating, “This goes out to all the haters at GDC from 2022-2024 if you aren’t taking Roblox seriously then you are getting left behind!”. They also included images comparing their 5 million peak to the top 10 game peaks on Steam. Here are the top five Steam games, three of which are also free-to-play:
- PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS – 3,236,027
- Black Myth: Wukong – 2,406,967
- Palworld – 2,101,535
- Counter-Strike 2 – 1,818,368
- Lost Ark – 1,324,761
We recently tried contacting the company Do Big Studios which may have acquired Grow a Garden or at least has a partnership with the original developer. While no information is known about the current deal, Do Big Studios does list Grow a Garden on their website under, “Our Games”. They haven’t responded to us yet. But one can assume their support has contributed to the new player record.
However, a common worry among Roblox players is when larger companies acquire games. The concern is that the new owner will aggressively monetize a popular game, leading to a dwindling player base in response. We’ll update this article with more information if they respond to our requests for comment.
Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.