Developer beef just helped Roblox set a 47-million-player record

Roblox-the-company might be in a rough spot right now, but the developers using its tools and platform to build and launch their own video games are reaching new virtual heights.

Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot are two of Roblox’s most popular games. One is a farm sim, and the other is a sort of thief’s paradise bootleg Pokémon, where players build hoards of pixel creatures, and can acquire new ones by stealing them from rivals’ bases. On any given day, they both tend to average around ~1 million concurrent players–a huge number.

But that number is nothing compared to the ones they hit this past weekend.

See, Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot have something important in common: They both run regular “Admin Abuse” events, where players who log in during set periods can get limited-edition drops from the game’s administrators. The joke is that admins are “abusing” their power by manipulating the game’s systems–but it has a positive connotation, since the manipulation is solely to reward players.

These events are catnip for pushing player numbers up. They require people to join the game at the same time, spiking concurrent player stats, and rely on FOMO by offering things like special items to ensure players are motivated to show up.

Both Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot run Admin Abuse events on weekends, and in the past have successfully spiked their numbers to ~15 million concurrent players each.

So, how to grow (and steal) past that figure?

Easy: Throw a good old-fashioned flame war.

Last week, Jandel, who made Grow a Garden, and SpyderSammy, who made Steal a Brainrot, started posting across TikTok, X, and Discord, hyping up their player bases for an all-out Aug. 23 “Admin War,” where both games’ Admin Abuse events would take place at the same time. And there were some pretty high stakes:

“I am declaring an official Admin Abuse war against Good Boy Sammy,” Jandel tweeted Aug. 15. “My wager. For every 1m players more than Steal a Brainrot–I will donate $5k to Team Water.”

“Challenge accepted @jandelRblx,” SpyderSammy responded. “‘Good Boy’ Sammy will show you what good admin abuse is. I’d be happy to match your wager and donate to Team Water as well regardless of who wins.”

The kayfabe did its job. Saturday came, fans poured in, there were a few crash issues, and by the end of the day, Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot had both reached over 20 million concurrent viewers, and pushed Roblox-as-a-platform to 47.4 million–its highest concurrent player count yet.

Grow a Garden already set a record as Roblox’s most-concurrently-played game back in June, when it reached 21.6 million players. The Aug. 23 Admin War put it up to 21.1 million, so not quite record-breaking. Steal a Brainrot, though, set its own new record at 20 million, becoming the second Roblox title ever to hit that concurrent player figure.

Both games have now beat Fortnite‘s concurrent player record of 15.3 million, set in 2020 by its Marvel finale event (and recognized by Guinness).

As for Roblox itself, that 47.4 million puts it ahead of Steam‘s record 40.2 million. (Steam, for the uninitiated, is owned by Team Fortress 2 developer Valve, and is the largest seller/launcher of PC games available. It regularly has tens of millions of people buying and playing thousands of different games.) Steam set that this past March, thanks to traffic driven by new AAA releases like Monster Hunter Wilds.

All this means that Roblox is officially the world’s highest-concurrent-player game platform, and Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot are among the world’s highest-concurrent-player games.

Does that mean they’ll always have such commanding traffic? Not necessarily. At press time, they’ve both dropped back down to their usual ~1 million concurrents. But 1 million is nothing to sneeze at, and this successful player engagement event shows that increasingly, Roblox might just be the YouTube of gaming: a massive repository of passion-driven, user-generated content that’s succeeding with fans, advertisers, and investors while the institutional industries around it struggle.