Grow a Garden was initially created by a 16-year-old named BMWLux, who developed the game in just a few days. It was a simple farming game on Roblox.
Then BMWLux teamed up with Janzen “Jandel” Madsen, a successful Roblox developer in New Zealand. Jandel spotted it early and was impressed.
Jandel and his Splitting Point Studios acquired a share and expanded the game’s development, along with another studio, Do Big Studios. They started doing live updates for the game and grew it rapidly. Within two weeks it had risen from 500 concurrent users to about 100,000 concurrent users.
Now the game is at 60 million daily active users and its peak concurrent users is 22.3 million players, all playing the game at once. Not bad for a game that debuted on March 26, 2025, just 104 days ago.
In just a few months, the game has been played 30 billion times. And on Saturday night, the game won Best New Experience at the Roblox Innovation Awards. I caught up with Madsen to talk about the magical rise of Grow A Garden at the Roblox Developer Conference in San Jose, California.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: I’m very impressed. What was the origin story?
Janzen Madsen: Grow a Garden was actually made by a 16-year-old. We partnered with the creator, the original creator, when the game was at around maybe 500 CCUs, 10,000 to 20,000 DAUs. We implemented a live service. We started weekly updates. My company is called Splitting Point. We’re known for doing weekly updates in games across Roblox. We just did that for Grow a Garden. The rest is history.
GamesBeat: How quickly did it hit some of the big milestones?
Madsen: Maybe within two weeks we were at about 100,000 CCUs. I could get you the actual quote on this, but we hit a million CCUs in about a month. Honestly I can’t even tell you the timeline to when we started hitting 15-20 million. It’s a bit of a blur now.
GamesBeat: Was there some kind of mechanic that seemed to be the thing that people really liked? Some piece of it?
Madsen: I think the theme–if you think about farming and gardening, it’s been innate to humans for thousands of years. It’s only until the industrial revolution that most of us became non-farmers. The theme and genre is as generic as you can get. Everyone likes to farm, to watch something grow. And the whole idea of the garden growing offline, the persistent world. You return and your plants have grown bigger, or you’ve grown new fruit. It was a novel concept for Roblox. That was pretty cool to see.
GamesBeat: Spotting it was important. That seems to be a definite skill among some of the veterans on Roblox, or the analytics people, or even the investors. They’re all saying, “What’s going like this (upward), and how can we make it go like this? (upward sharply and to the right)” Spotting the fast-growing, viral games, is that hard to do?
Madsen: It’s the million-dollar question, I guess. The answer is yes and no. I actually knew pretty quickly that Grow a Garden was going to be successful. My feeling–I thought, when I first started working on the game, that it would hit at least 100,000. That was my floor. We’ve acquired games multiple times now that have gone viral on Roblox. I like to think of Roblox as a bit like YouTube or TikTok. Things become massive entertainment franchises within a few weeks. Roblox is like that all the time. Every couple of months a new massive title will come along. Look at 99 Nights. That game came out a few months ago and now it’s one of the biggest games in the world ever. That’s just one of the many stories on Roblox. It’s a by-product of the platform.
GamesBeat: What numbers has Grow a Garden hit now?
Madsen: Our peak concurrent was 22.3 million. Daily active users is around 60 million peak, I think. Total plays is about 30 billion. In three or four months. It’s crazy.
GamesBeat: What does it mean that it is that big? What things do you notice? It’s culturally known now, part of mass culture. What have you seen about how far it reaches?
Madsen: Personally, it’s pretty invasive. I’m kind of a celebrity in some ways. I have 12 million followers on TikTok. People come up to me in the street, which I don’t really like. I lived a pretty humble life before this. To be honest, I don’t necessarily even think of the numbers. I’m a passionate game developer. I think one of the reasons we’re successful is because we put our product first. Our decisions are made for players, not necessarily some investor or an executive board. I think that resonates with the community a lot. Roblox is like that for everyone. I think Roblox is the only platform where product leaders can actually create games, release games, and that’s why you have all these breakouts in eccentric genres. You just focus on making a good game and none of the business stuff.
GamesBeat: The 16-year-old, have they shared many details about who they are?
Madsen: No. They want to be completely anonymous.
GamesBeat: Is that person still involved?
Madsen: Yes, they still have a percentage of the game. They make contributions. They have update ideas pretty regularly. They’re a big part of the team. I’d describe them as extremely intelligent. I’m a pretty arrogant designer, and I think they humble me a lot.
GamesBeat: Do you think it could have been anyone, or do you think it had to be this person to make this game?
Madsen: It’s funny. I knew the individual before Grow a Garden. I was telling my friends, this person is going to make the next big Roblox game. You see it often on the platform. You see these emerging developers. Another good one is RiccoMiller, who made Dead Rails. They start to create a game, and the next comes out and it’s a bit bigger. The next game comes out and it’s a bit bigger than that. Then they eventually have a hit. You see that across the platform pretty regularly.
GamesBeat: What’s interesting to me is that it’s a new ground floor for the game industry. All these people are making hits, and they never could have gotten jobs in the game industry just getting out of college. It almost seems like–would your advice to people be to just go start making stuff on Roblox instead of going through four years of game design school? Is there a conclusion you can draw from this?
Madsen: I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong path. My life, if I think back through it, I’ve just followed what I’m passionate about. We have lots of extremely talented people at our company that went to university, went to college and studied. They’re big contributors to the game. The education and academic background brings something to the company. I’m probably the lowest common denominator. I didn’t do any external studies. I’m not a great programmer. I make a lot of mistakes. Those people, I really need them. They make massive contributions. I guess my advice would be that if you feel you want to become more academic, become a software engineer, that’s a good path. If you want to just become a designer or create a game, Roblox is amazing for that too.
GamesBeat: How did you learn?
Madsen: I started in Minecraft. I made Minecraft sims. Then I built games in Unreal and Unity. I saw Roblox at a party. I was 21. I just made a game. I can’t program. I was pretty awful at it. But I just did it. Just created a game. I know it sounds a bit flip-floppy, but that’s what it was.
GamesBeat: How many games had you worked on before Grow a Garden?
Madsen: Maybe 30 or 40. Most of them were terrible. Maybe five or six of them were good.
GamesBeat: Did that learning process get you to a point of being able to take advantage of the big opportunities?
Madsen: I’ve made games in multiple genres. I’ve made shooters. I’ve made social games. I’ve made simulators, which would be like an incremental game. Every game, I’d take something away from it and apply it to my next game. It’s an apprenticeship of sorts.
GamesBeat: Where are you based now?
Madsen: New Zealand.
GamesBeat: Roblox just introduced the new 4D creation features. What do you think about that, the possibilities?
Madsen: If you think about Roblox in 2008 and 2009, most creators were players. They were young, 15 or 16. These people have gone on to create massive businesses on Roblox. Their original learning came from using free models, these things called free models. There was a toolbox. If you wanted to drag a gun or a car into the game, you’d drag it into the studio and it’d already be scripted for you. For me, 4D is the ultimate extension of that. I could see the idea of–someone who’s just learning game development can now type in what they want and they don’t even have to learn how to program. They can just become great designers. It’s augmentive. It’s pretty cool.
GamesBeat: Are there other things you saw announced today that you think will be useful?
Madsen: I think one thing that got kind of passed off is auto-LOD. The whole idea that you can just upload a model and the LODs get automatically converted for you, that will be massive.