Minimalistic games are dominating Roblox

Every year, games get a little more complex, with highly detailed and realistic graphics, deep customization options, and vast open worlds teeming with discoverable content.  

But over on Roblox, the gaming platform where blocky lego-like player avatars characters bustle through countless user-created mini-games, the aesthetics and gameplay has always had a messy, DIY feel. 

So, it came as a shock when this summer, a Roblox game—Grow a Garden—achieved an incredible feat: it beat out Fortnite to reach the highest total number of concurrent players at 21 million. 

Grow a Garden is one of a few recent Roblox games that show that simple games can attract huge audiences. 

This past year, low effort games on Roblox have blown up with millions of players worldwide– games like “Grow a Garden,” “Steal a Brainrot,” “99 Nights in the Forest” and newly “Plants vs Brainrots.” Meanwhile even on Roblox, games that have higher production values don’t perform nearly as well. These simplistic games capture kids, teens and even adults with short gameplay loops that are easy to learn. This highlights a trend among young people of prioritizing quick and easy games over a complex storyline and/or difficult mechanics. As TikTok and other platforms influence how teens engage with content, these minimalistic games seem to suggest that for success on Roblox, simplicity is key. 

Despite the basic graphics of the content on Roblox, the platform does feature some more involved games. There are skill-based games, like fighting games, FPS games and adventure games, some of which have been popular in the past. Games like “Blox Fruits” pulled in hundreds of thousands of players every month with big, detailed worlds and long-term goals. Players could battle each other or NPCs, do quests, level up, and trade items. All that took time. Even games like “Dungeon Quest” or “Tower Defense Simulator” required teamwork and strategy to win and grind for hours.  

I tried Grow a Garden to get a better sense of what the draw was. Many of my friends were already playing it. At first it seemed incredibly so boring. Nothing stood out, all I wanted to do was quickly develop my garden and doing that was very simple, it just took a little bit of time. I kept upgrading and soon the repetitive dopamine hits from following the grind-and-upgrade loop were keeping me playing. I had started with one seed and now my garden was a beautiful mess with all kinds of different crops, arranged how I wanted to arrange them.  

I finally got the hype, so I kept playing and keeping up with updates.  

People I’ve talked to that like these games because they’re easy to play and simple, they like to talk with friends while progressing in something, “It infinitely goes, you know? There’s always a way to get better, upgrading your plants, brainrots,” says one eleventh-grade student. “Some games are just doing too much, too complicated, but these games are very simple, easy to understand.”  

However not everyone appreciates this approach. And on Roblox where games are user-created, it is common to find many similar copy-cat games that repeat the same idea everywhere. “There just has not been ANY originality in the past couple months,” says Jonathan Rodriguez who has been playing Roblox for a decade. 

“Some games deserve way more recognition, people only play these games because they’re trending” says Rodriguez. He says he misses when games were more creative and not just a cash grab.  

Whether you love or hate them, these games are impossible to ignore. They’ve changed what players expect from Roblox and what developers think will go viral next. 

Gen Z to Gen-Alpha are used to scrolling and decreasing attention spans, if a reel doesn’t catch your attention in the first second, you won’t watch it, same thing goes for Roblox games, that’s why minimalistic games fit into that lifestyle. You can play it in between homework or while chatting with friends, it’s fun without needing full focus, and that is why it’s so easy to go back.  

I used to think these games were boring, I wanted something action-based that looked amazing and needed hours to beat. But there’s a reason why I played Grow a Garden for a month, I can just turn off my brain and do something that feels good, even if it’s simple. 

Maybe that’s what makes these games so fun. In a world where everything moves fast, sometimes the simplest things are what bring people of all ages together.

Cover Image: Archer King