A Roblox Game About Adopting Critters Just Set A New Concurrent Player Record

For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon that is Roblox, it's less a self-contained game than it is a platform for third-party developers to release their own unique games and experiences onto. One of the most popular is Adopt Me, a game that sees players collecting and hatching cute collectable creatures from eggs. Adopt Me regularly breaks concurrent user records on the platform when releasing new content, and its latest release was no different, seeing almost 2 million players in the game at once.

The news was tweeted out by Adopt Me developer Josh Ling, who celebrated 1.92 million concurrent players logging on for the game's April 17 Ocean Egg release. The Adopt Me studio DreamCraft beat their own previous record of 1.78 million, and have been record-setters many times before that. Many of the comments on Adopt Me's tweets and YouTube videos come from Roblox players complaining about Adopt Me's massive releases "breaking" the Roblox platform.

The game's updates are designed to foster record-breaking numbers of concurrent users, encouraging players to log in to participate in a live countdown to new content releases. This results in the steep player spikes seen in Ling's screenshots, which he has previously taken to YouTube to explain after criticism that the player data looked suspicious.

Then, Ling had tweeted a celebration of Adopt Me's continued growth, pointing out that a concurrent user count of 465,000 was record-breaking in mid-2019, while by early 2020 the game was hitting those numbers weekly.

Adopt Me also recently celebrated being the first Roblox game to reach 20 billion total visits, and was officially recognized in the 2020 Bloxy Awards for Most Visits, Most Concurrent Players, and Highest Total 2020 Playtime. The game sees regular weekly spikes between 400,000 and 700,000 concurrents, though at the moment its dominance is being challenged by a roleplay game called Brookhaven, which won Best New Game in the 2020 Bloxys.

Roblox as a whole has seen a lot of growth in the last year, which culminated in an impressive debut on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year--though as recently as March 2021, the company's CEO confirmed that it still doesn't make a profit.