Gaming has gone weird of late. Publishers and developers are being closed, the gaming giants are making hundreds upon hundreds of people redundant. And now millions of people are playing some strange game called Banana, made by a tiny developer.
According to SteamDB, more than 800,000 people are playing Banana at the time of writing. It hit a peak concurrent user count of 884,469 players, and is the second most popular game on PC platform Steam right now, behind Counter-Strike 2.
What is the Banana game?
Want to know the odd part? It’s barely a game. Banana is a “clicker” title. You click the banana on-screen and a counter rises.
Folks actually playing Banana will use what’s known as an auto-clicker, which emulates rapid mouse clicks so they don’t have to give themselves RSI to make the score counter rise.
However, there’s no real point to the game as-is. There are no levels. It is definitely not fun as a game, and there’s a darker level underneath you should be aware of if – for example, if your kids are playing Banana right now.
“Every three and 18 hours, you get dropped a banana,” is the official line. These are collectables that can then be traded and sold on the Steam marketplace.
For example, right now there are more than 192,000 “spacenana” collectables listed on the Steam market, each selling for 3p.
There are, however, supposedly highly rare bananas that are considered to be more valuable. The “crypticnana” is listed at £1,343.28 on the Steam marketplace at the time of writing.
Is the Banana game a scam?
Like a strange return to the world of NFTs, Banana isn’t so much a game as a miniature speculator’s economy. Players aren’t running the game to play the game, but in the hope of earning collectable bananas they will be able to sell on for actual money.
To make Banana an even more effective money-making project for its makers, the collectable bananas released into the game are made by its own Discord community. It has more than 107,000 members at the time of writing, further getting its audience hooked on the concept.
However, there’s a real question of how many of Banana’s “players” are actually real.
“People are abusing up to 1,000 alternative accounts in order to get rarer drops or at least drops in bulk,” Banana developer Hery told Polygon.
You can see the player base is anything but normal in the SteamDB numbers, too. It’s normal for a game to have daily peaks and troughs, as the most gamer-populated countries clock off for the night. But Banana? Its user count continues to simply grow, with only tiny blips based on the time of day.
Banana was released on April 23, 2024, but it wasn’t until June that the game truly took off. And it’s not clear where the ceiling is for this one yet.
What is clear: if it seems like people will be able to make money “for free”, you’re sure to attract a crowd. This is the worst of Web3.0 thinking in action.
The developer has described it as an “infinite money glitch”.
Banana’s success has also inspired copycats, and Banana itself is based on a clicker game called Egg, released in February 2024. Cats and Banana & Cucumber are both on SteamDB’s trending games list, too.
Like Banana, they are not really games, but bring the promise of free money. We can see there are literally millions of banana items listed on the Steam market right now.
What’s less clear is how much money is actually changing hands in this confected economy based solely on speculation. We have approached Steam owner Valve for comment on Banana. Our advice? Steer clear and play something actually fun.
