With a peak player count of 14.2 million, 99 Nights in the Forest has an audience other multiplayer games would kill for: 'To find these behemoth playerbases you need to be on a platform like Roblox'

When I was a kid I might get a videogame for Christmas and another for my birthday, but in between it was free games that filled my time. First shareware, then Flash games. If you were a kid after 2006 though, the free games that defined your childhood probably involved Roblox. In 2025, players spent more than 10 billion hours playing Roblox every month, more hours than they spent on Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite put together.

One of the big Roblox hits of 2025 was 99 Nights in the Forest, a survival-crafting game that peaked at 14.2 million concurrent players. Which is 2.7 times the population of New Zealand, where its creators Grandma's Favourite Games are based.

Developer Alec Kieft, AKA Cracky4, also grew up on Flash games, but got into Roblox for the multiplayer. A well-meaning math teacher thought it would be more educational than it turned out to actually be. "There were not a lot of experiences on Roblox that you could argue were like learning experiences or educational in any way," Kieft...