The signs of an oncoming Roblox downpour in 2024 have erupted into a full-blown storm in the second half of 2025. When we first saw those gathering clouds, we covered how brands could use influencer marketing in tandem with Roblox (and other UGC games/platforms) to reach a wider audience. Fast forward to August, and Roblox hit 47.4M concurrent users – that’s higher than Steam’s all-time peak of 40.3M across the entire platform. In light of this recent spike in demand for experiences like Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot, we wanted to reopen the topic to show how Roblox’s players are turning to live streaming for an off-platform community.
TL;DR Takeaways from Stream Hatchet:
- Roblox’s live-streaming community is mainly found on YouTube Gaming, with 85% of August 2025’s viewership being on the Google-backed platform.
- YouTube has started tracking viewership for specific high-profile experiences like Grow a Garden, making the platform more transparent for advertisers.
- The types of experiences being enjoyed by Roblox players, from Productivity Sims to RP experiences, are also enjoyed by live-streaming communities.
Roblox Owes its Streaming Viewership to YouTube Gaming
Prior to May of 2025, Roblox’s monthly viewership had failed to exceed 20M hours watched. However, within 5 months (from March to August of 2025), this number jumped up to 85.6M hours watched – a 5X increase in monthly viewership. You’ll already have guessed the reason for this new demand, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, note that YouTube accounted for 85% of August’s viewership: A massive deviation from the typical distribution for games where Twitch is the leader. As covered in our YouTube Basics article, YouTube Gaming is the go-to platform for content aimed at younger audiences. It also boasts VOD storage, making it ideal for games that perform well with non-live content.
Another perk for YouTube is YouTube Shorts: The most popular option for short-form content behind only TikTok. YouTube Shorts are primarily used to generate awareness, capturing casual viewers scrolling through social media and gradually building their interest in a topic. The rise in the amount of YouTube Shorts being created around Roblox content presaged the boom in popularity later in the year, with over 100K YouTube Shorts created in January 2025 and later in July 2025. It’s possible that catching spikes in interest like these could be used as a predictor of future success for other games as well. Long-form videos on YouTube have also been rising, with a massive 2.9M videos being created between August 2024 to August 2025.
Grow a Garden Catches YouTube Gaming’s Tracking Attention
It should come as no surprise that the main driver behind Roblox’s recent popularity has been the breakout hit Grow a Garden: A Farming Simulator with its own internal economy for trading between users. In July of 2025, Grow a Garden accounted for 56% of all Roblox viewership at 44.5M hours watched, dwarfing not only every other experience, but indeed all other experiences combined. This number drowns out the signal produced by last year’s success Dress to Impress which only hit a peak monthly viewership of 782K hours watched (based specifically on streams including the experience’s name in their titles).
Thankfully, we were able to much more accurately gauge Grow a Garden’s live-streaming viewership thanks to recent changes by YouTube. YouTube now tracks not just Roblox viewership, but viewership for select, specific experiences within the platform. This is a complete game changer: If YouTube is able to track more experiences in the future, advertisers and influencers will gain better insights into where to find their audiences within Roblox’s ecosystem. This is essential as more experiences become massive hits, including some that are already matching or even exceeding Grow a Garden’s player count like Steal a Brainrot, 99 Nights in the Forest, and Brookhaven RP. YouTube should continue segmenting this data and making it available via their API if they hope to make Roblox more transparent to advertisers.
Streamers Rally to Cultivate a Community Around Roblox in Just a Few Months
As touched on earlier, the popularity of Roblox on live-streaming followed after the rise in player count for the game (as tracked by Rotrends). However, the effect on live-streaming was far more dramatic: While player counts roughly doubled from March to August of 2025, streaming viewership quintupled over the same period. The possible reason for this outsized growth on live-streaming may come down to the nature of Grow a Garden: The experience has its own economy, and people turn to streaming to stay updated on live changes in the Roblox marketplace. We’ve seen this behaviour before with other games that have online marketplaces, like World of Warcraft and Diablo, and for real-life markets like cryptocurrency and stocks. It only makes sense that Roblox’s virtual marketplace would encourage the growth of a similar market-savvy audience.
Additionally, Grow a Garden’s gameplay sits within an already-popular genre among live-streaming audiences: Productivity Simulator Games. Other games within this genre like Supermarket Simulator and, more recently, Schedule I, have also had big surges in demand over the past couple of years. And, interestingly, these games also feature pared-back visuals (Schedule I in particular could easily be a Roblox experience itself if not for the more adult content). The point here is that the types of experiences being enjoyed by Roblox players, from Productivity Sims to RP experiences, are also enjoyed by live-streaming communities.
This culture is exemplified by some of the top streamers of Roblox content over the past 3 months. Streamers like ThijmenVC and FLINTT, for example, have generated millions of hours watched from Grow a Garden trading streams that broadcast stocks 24/7. Of course, there are still the OG UGC streamers like KreekCraft and Windah Basudara who brought in 8.4M and 1.6M hours watched over the last 3 months, respectively. While some of these streamers will dabble in other UGC games (like AlsoTom streaming Fortnite), becoming a top streamer for a game like Roblox often requires constant gameplay and (sometimes) teams of assistants/mods to stay on top of emerging trends.
It’s for this reason that the Roblox space can seem totally impenetrable to brands. The fast-paced, disposable nature of experiences means that just as a brand is starting to catch onto a trend, the experience has dropped off and the player base has moved to some new fad. It’s almost punk in essence: Chasing what’s new to outrace the mainstream. This seemingly exclusionary culture filled with memes and so-called brainrot is what actually makes this space “cool” to younger audiences, as detailed brilliantly by Superjoost Playlist. The cost of entry to this space is one that most brands just can’t afford: Time.
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As usual when we cover Roblox (or UGC in general), there’s never enough space to cover all the intricacies of the ecosystem: New updates, trending experiences, and communities growing out of the platform. With Roblox now too big to fail, major shifts in the advertising landscape are about to take place. Streaming platforms will no doubt strive to improve data transparency, which we’ll be providing access to when possible.
However, this doesn’t solve the immediate issue of knowing what’s trending on Roblox. For this, brands should seek out experts in the space to partner with for activations like Stephen Dypiangco from Max Power Gaming, and agencies that can help execute UGC activations like Zoned.gg. For our part, we’ll be covering every major development in the Roblox and UGC space to keep you informed on how to best tap into these communities.
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