A new game is rising on the Steam most-played charts, and it’s not a new battle royale or Call of Duty game. It’s a free-to-play clicker game where all you do is click an illustration of a banana. At the time of this writing, Banana has around 434,000 concurrent players, but it peaked in the past 24 hours at around 480,000. Over the course of the day, it’s risen in the charts above Apex Legends, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Elden Ring, which are all regularly at the top of the Steam player charts. All of this information comes from SteamDB, a third-party site that tracks Steam data.
Why is a game about clicking a banana doing so well? There’s certainly a novelty factor that’s being spread by word of mouth. Plus, the better it does, the more people want to find the appeal for themselves. It also helps that it’s free, so it’s pretty easy to check it out. However, the key to its Steam success is its inventory system. Every so often, when you click the banana, you’ll get a new banana added to your Steam inventory, which you can then sell in the Community Market. Most are going for a few cents, but at the time of this writing, there’s a banana selling for around $780.
It’s unclear how many bananas are available, but heading to the market, you’ll see a panda banana, a banana that’s a horse, a glitching banana, a unicorn, and so many others. In the game, there’s also a shop button that’ll take you to the Banana Item Store, where you can buy bananas for 25 cents each. Many of them are also only available for a limited time; early in June, the game’s Discord reached 10,000 members, so a 10K Celebration banana was dropped in the game for 24 hours.
So some of this player count is people just seeing why everybody is playing Banana, but a lot of it is people who want to find rare banana drops and sell them on Steam for real-world cash. This will then go into their Steam Wallets and can be used to buy games or even more bananas.
Unfortunately, according to Hery, one of the developers, many of the players are probably bots. “Unfortunately we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk,” Hery told Polygon.
Either way, the developers understand the appeal. “I do believe that the reason why it mostly caught on is because it’s a legal ‘Infinite money glitch,’” Hery said. “Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items.”
