By Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg
Roblox Corp.’s 2-month-old Grow a Garden video game has quickly become one of the most-played titles in its history — and spawned a market for virtual crops and livestock that appears to violate company rules.
At a recent peak on Saturday, May 24, some 8.7 million people were playing at once, roughly the population of Switzerland, according to data from RoMonitor Stats, an independent analysis site.
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Playable on any device and by almost anyone, Grow a Garden lets users plant seeds, grow crops and raise animals to ramp up the beauty of their virtual gardens. Since plants grow even when the users aren’t online, it encourages gamers to come back and see how their gardens have bloomed. Some of the seeds hold surprises.
“The idea that you could grow a normal carrot or a rainbow carrot — kids love that stuff,” said analyst David Taylor at market researcher Naavik.
The game’s success also speaks to Roblox’s unique business model. The company relies on independent developers who make games using its tools and publish them on the platform. It then shares the revenue generated from in-game purchases. Roblox, based in San Mateo, California, was founded in 2004, but its popularity exploded during the pandemic, when people were stuck at home with little to do. Last year, the company generated $180.2 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization on sales of $3.6 billion.
Janzen “Jandel” Madsen, who runs New Zealand’s Splitting Point Studios, purchased Grow a Garden from an independent developer and assigned a team to work on it, according to the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. The developer was a teenager who still owns about half of the game, according to Game File. He “literally made the game in like three days,” Madsen told the publication.
Grow a Garden generates revenue from the sale of in-game items like seeds and eggs, which players can purchase with either the game’s currency, Sheckles, or Roblox’s currency, Robux. Players can sell their crops for virtual currency in the game, which they can use to buy more or better seeds.
Some players aren’t satisfied with earning digital Sheckles from their pretend business. Thousands of listings across online marketplaces and social media advertise virtual grape seeds, dragonfly pets and mangoes for sale.
Players who want to advance faster can buy rare virtual seeds from third-party sellers and grow more valuable fruits and vegetables in the game. Animals also increase players’ wealth by finding rare seeds and produce for their owners. In the end, gamers can show off their beautiful, vibrant gardens to friends.
Prices range from 5 cents for an eggplant to $200 for a polar bear on a marketplace like Eldorado.gg that’s not affiliated with Roblox. According to the site’s chief executive officer, Vladas Jurkevičius, Grow a Garden players spend millions of dollars every week on these items. Some are either hard to obtain or are obtained purely by chance. He believes gamers have a right to resell digital items they acquire.
“There will always be players that have these items, but don’t need them and those who want these items but don’t have them,” he said in an email.
Grow a Garden launched on March 25, and between late April and May, Jurkevičius saw a 40-fold increase in sales for the farming items on his site.
User statistics suggest Grow a Garden is particularly popular outside the US, according to TD Cowen analysts Doug Creutz and Mei Lun Quach. The game accounts for as much as 30% of Roblox’s total activity, they estimated.
“We have seen other titles break 10%, but we don’t think Roblox has ever had an experience be this dominant,” they wrote in a May 20 research note.
Gamers have earned cash selling digital items for decades. In China, incarcerated people killed monsters and sought treasures in Activision Blizzard Inc.’s World of Warcraft in exchange for the in-game currency, which was then resold by their guards. Over the pandemic, people in the Philippines earned money raising virtual pets in the NFT game Axie Infinity. A virtual gun in the game Counter-Strike 2 sold for more than $1 million last year.
There’s a catch at Roblox, however. Its terms of service prohibit players from buying, selling or trading the virtual Robux currency or in-game items for money. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Some sellers list hundreds of Grow a Garden items, including on sites like eBay and Facebook. The volume of listings suggests there may be teams of people producing virtual items for sale.
One gamer is trying to sell the virtual dragonflies he farms for $12.50 each in a text chat on Discord. Every couple of minutes, the gamer will post messages such as “Selling 6x Dragonfly 1x mantis 1x 20kg cow 5x choc sprinkler Usd.” It can take several days to obtain a dragonfly, which the owner can use in the game to turn any fruit into a more valuable one.
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