A 17-Year-Old's 3-Day Farm Game Beat Fortnite

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Hello, subscriber.

Last week, Bloomberg ran a fascinating story. A 19-year-old who grew up in a trailer park in Nova Scotia, Canada, with nothing but an iPad, is now making ₩500,000,000 (~$360,000) a month. What he built wasn’t some cutting-edge 3D game — it was a ‘fishing game,’ made in the gaps between homework and a part-time job at a Chinese restaurant. (Yes, actual fishing!)

At the same time, EA and Ubisoft — companies with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in spending — are facing a historic crisis. A game Sony poured $400 million (₩520 billion) into vanished just 14 days after launch. What on earth is happening in the gaming industry? Today I want to talk about the massive economy that teenagers have built, largely under our radar. EA is the studio behind the FIFA soccer series; Ubisoft is known for the Unity development tool and the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

What’s Happening in the Nation of Roblox

Let’s start with scale. In Q4 2025, Roblox had 144 million daily active users — more than the entire population of Japan. Annual revenue reached roughly $5 billion (₩6.5 trillion), and payouts to creators alone topped $1.5 billion (₩2 trillion).

But what’s truly striking is the profile of the people earning this money. The Roblox millionaires Bloomberg interviewed share a common thread: almost none graduated from college. More than half stopped their education after high school.

Nate Colley, the 19-year-old mentioned above, earns $400,000 a month from his fishing game ‘Fisch.’ Lego and Walmart advertise on in-game fishing rods. Chrollo, 20, earns eight figures a year — more than $10 million — and drives a McLaren. Jonathan Courtney, 26, makes $100,000 a month designing avatar items, sponsored by Adidas.

And then there’s the most iconic case of all. A 16-year-old developer built a farming game called ‘Grow a Garden’ in just three days — a simple game where you plant, grow, harvest, and sell crops. It hit 22.3 million concurrent players in the summer of 2025, breezing past Fortnite’s all-time record of 15.3 million. In May 2025 alone, it generated $12 million (₩15.6 billion) in revenue.