RNZ
A game developer from Nelson is partly behind the explosion in popularity of Grow a Garden, a Roblox game where players plant virtual seeds and grow exotic plants - and it had 20 million people playing it at once last weekend.
This makes it one of the most played games of the year, surpassing previous records of concurrent players set by the hugely popular battle title, Fortnite.
The New York Times pointed out that’s triple the population of New Zealand, the home of Janzen Madsen, who runs Splitting Point Studios, which scouts and acquires rising games on the platform.
The company picked up Grow a Garden when it had just a few thousand users, the 28-year-old says.
“The game was created by a 16-year-old in three or four days, I’d known him previously, and we partnered together, he still helps out on the game, he’s still part of the development from pretty early on.”
A “big team effort” took the game from a few thousand to millions of players, he says.
“We’ve got a bunch of people at the company that are extremely talented, that have worked with us for, five to 10 years.”
According to Roblox, the game has had about 9 billion visits since it was created in March, the BBC reported. It said 35 percent of Grow a Garden's players up until now have been aged 13 and under.
Seeing that many people playing concurrently was “pretty awesome".
“The reason that many people are playing? I don't know, it’s like a moment in gaming that is pretty unique,” Nelson born Janzen says.
“For like active players in the game at one time, I guess this weekend we beat them [Fortnite] by 5 million, maybe 6 million players, so yeah, it is really crazy.”
Grow a Garden involves players slowly developing a little patch of virtual land on the online gaming platform, Roblox.
Once your garden produces a harvest, you can sell your items. You can also steal from the gardens of others.
Janzen puts Grow a Garden's popularity down to the fact it’s built by gamers for gamers.
“Often these games that these big studios put out are like just run by investors and they don’t necessarily like align to what players want, they just want to juice them for as much money as they can.
“This game is run by a bunch of passionate developers that just want to build something for gamers and it’s a community.”
US-based Roblox is one of the world's largest games platforms. At the start of 2025, nearly 90 million people were active in the virtual universe. Roblox recently introduced a range of new safety features to reduce the risk of harm to children.
