I pulled Roblox's public API every day for a week to watch one game go vertical

Late August I kept seeing the name Dungeon Lootr in places it hadn't been before. I wanted to know whether the game was actually growing or whether I was just noticing it more. Turns out Roblox exposes enough public data to answer that without an API key, so I started pulling it every day. The endpoint is boring in the best way: curl "https://games.roblox.com/v1/games?universeIds=9656201728" You get back visits , playing , favoritedCount , updated and a few other fields. A second call to /v1/games/votes?universeIds=... gives you up and down votes. No auth, no rate-limit drama at once-a-day volume. Here is what a week of that looks like for this one game: Date Total visits Playing right now Favorites Approval Sep 2 4.83M — 25.5k 96% Sep 3 5.39M 10.8k 29.8k 96.1% Sep 4 6.85M 11.4k 38.6k 96.1% That is about 1.4 million more visits than when I checked yesterday, and favorites jumped by almost nine thousand. The updated timestamp moved twice in two days (Sep 2 23:06 UTC and Sep 4 00:56 UTC), so the developers are shipping while the curve is climbing rather than sitting on it. The part that surprised me: the game was created on January 31, 2026. It sat there for seven months doing nothing visible, then flipped in the last week of August. I do not have a clean explanation. No single creator video I can point to, no front-page placement I noticed. It just started compounding. I wrapped the two calls into a tiny CLI so I would stop retyping the universe ID: https://github.com/jackzhouqd/roblox-game-stats — plain Python, no dependencies. Point it at any universe ID and it prints the same table. A few caveats before anyone reads too much into this: visits is cumulative and not deduplicated. It counts sessions, not people. playing is a snapshot at the moment you call it. Hit it at 3am and you will get a different number than at 8pm. One day of movement means nothing on its own. A week of movement in the same direction is when I start paying attention. What I am doing with it: I