By James Liu
I think the title says enough, but let’s look a bit more into what exactly happened on October 10th, when the game “Adopt Me!” broke records and servers.
“Adopt Me!” is undeniably the most popular game on Roblox with no questions about it. Appealing heavily to young children, it’s a pet care simulator similar to a Tamagotchi. To get pets, players hatch eggs which contain random pets to take care of and grow. With bright colors and fun animals, it’s easy to see how so many children would readily flock to the game en masse, similar in a way to Club Penguin and its puffles. Now what exactly made October 10th special?
On October 10th, “Adopt Me!” was set to release a new fossil egg, containing prehistoric animals. These new and exciting critters had hundreds of thousands join the game before the servers tanked and many disconnected. According to a graph released by @tactful, a developer for “Adopt Me!”, the game was climbing in numbers before a sharp drop at just under 1 million players two hours before the update was scheduled. From there, player count was increasing and decreasing shakily with numerous more drops and weird trends in join behavior. The game peaked at 1,786,076 players around 45 minutes after the update was released, and quickly dropped a few minutes later. Developer @tactful believes that numbers could have easily surpassed 2 million and possibly 3 million players if the servers had no issues.
While it’s easy to blame a popular game with close to 2 million people playing for breaking the servers, it seems like there’s more to the story. The first initial hit to player numbers was below 1 million players, a number that “Adopt Me!” has been able to break multiple times in the past without issue with other updates. It’s fair to say that “Adopt Me!” didn’t just cause the servers to crash out of nowhere, and that the servers just had issues regardless of the update. Regardless of whether “Adopt Me!” is to blame directly for issues or whether it was just bad luck, breaking records even with server and connection issues is an absolutely massive feat. It’s safe to say that “Adopt Me!” is going to stay on top of the charts for a long time with player counts like this.
