99 Nights in the Forest hits 14.2 million players on Roblox

14.2 million concurrent players. That number puts 99 Nights in the Forest in territory that most multiplayer games never sniff, and developer Alec Kieft (known online as Cracky4) has a straightforward explanation for how it happened: build on Roblox, where the players already are.

How a survival game found a massive audience

Kieft and his colleagues at Grandma's Favourite Games are based in New Zealand, a country with a population of roughly 5 million. Their peak player count is 2.7 times that. The game sits inside Roblox, a platform that analysts say pulled in more than 10 billion player-hours per month in 2025, beating Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. That context matters a lot when you're trying to understand how a survival-crafting game built by a small indie team ended up with numbers that rival some of the biggest live-service titles on the planet.

"Kids are on Roblox, and that's where the players are," Kieft told PC Gamer. "To find these behemoth player bases you need to be on a platform like Roblox."

The key here is that Roblox functions less like a game and more like an operating system for a generation of players. You don't need to win a Steam algorithm lottery or land a viral TikTok moment. The audience is already logged in.

From war clans to survival horror

Kieft's path to building 99 Nights in the Forest started in Roblox's own subcultures. He got into the platform through war clans, organized groups that built bases and raided each other with laser guns in military roleplay scenarios. That community is where he met his two co-creators. His first game, Defenders of Roblox, was a Left 4 Dead-inspired zombie shooter built while he was still learning to program, based on other Roblox remakes of Left 4 Dead he'd played before ever touching the original.

The game itself tasks players with surviving 99 nights in a forest, spending daylight hours gathering wood, scrap, and supplies while searching for four missing children. At night, the campfire becomes your anchor. Wander too far into the dark and you risk running into the Deer, a goggle-eyed upright-walking creature that's considerably more unsettling than the name suggests. It's the kind of horror game tension that works especially well in a cooperative setting.

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99 Nights in the Forest peaked at 14.2 million concurrent players on Roblox, placing it among the most-played experiences on the platform.

Standing apart from tycoons and simulators

When 99 Nights in the Forest launched, the dominant Roblox genres were tycoon games and simulator games, both essentially idle number-go-up experiences in the vein of Cookie Clicker. Grow a Garden, which reportedly pulled more concurrent players than Fortnite at its peak, is the clearest example of that formula.

99 Nights in the Forest is something different. Kieft describes it as a "very active experience" and a "very collaborative experience," one that thrives on weekends when players have time to gather a group and push through as many nights as possible together. There's enough downtime in the resource-gathering phase for socializing, which Kieft connects to what he calls the "friendslop" genre, multiplayer games designed primarily to give friends something to do while they catch up.

"I don't think survival games are too far removed from the friendslop genre," he says. "Which I think is my favorite genre to have emerged recently. Despite the name being a little bit derogatory."

The game's relative depth compared to most Roblox experiences may also explain one of the more surprising data points Kieft shared: even after two weeks without updates, 99 Nights in the Forest was still sitting at number three by daily active users on the platform.

Surviving without weekly updates

"We've been pleasantly surprised to see that the game hasn't fallen off a cliff as soon as we stopped doing those updates," Kieft said. "That was a fear that we had, that as soon as players sense there's no one at the wheel right now, they'll just move on to something else. But no, we're still I think number three by daily active users on the platform, despite having not updated now in two weeks. That's a huge relief."

Roblox's culture around updates is intense, particularly among younger players who expect new content on a near-weekly cadence. Kieft draws an analogy to Flash games: nobody was messaging the Bloons developers demanding a new map every week. You just loaded the game and played. That expectation has shifted, and he thinks it skews younger, with older players more willing to return to a game they already enjoy without needing a content drop as the excuse.

Grandma's Favourite Games does plan to expand the late-game and address gaps in the experience when they return from their break. But the fact that the audience held without constant updates suggests the game has something stickier than most Roblox experiences: players who haven't finished it yet.

For players looking to get the most out of the experience before the next content push, the 99 Nights in the Forest beginner's guide covers resource management, kid rescue strategies, and base defense. The full 99 Nights in the Forest guide collection has everything from daily quest optimization to the new classes added in recent updates.