A new game is climbing the most played lists Steam, and it is not a new Battle Royale or Call of Duty game. It is a free clicker game where all you have to do is click on an illustration of a banana.
At the time of writing this article, Banana has around 434,000 concurrent players, but peaked in the last 24 hours at around 480,000. Throughout the day, it has risen on the charts above Apex Legends, PUBG:Battlegrounds and Elden Ring, who are regularly at the top of Steam player charts. All of this information comes from SteamDB, a third-party site that tracks Steam data.
Why does a game about clicking a banana work so well? There is certainly a novelty factor that is spreading by word of mouth. Plus, the better you do it, the more people will 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 success on Steam is its inventory system. From time to time, when you click on the banana, a new banana will be added to your Steam inventory, which you can then sell on the Community Market. Most sell for a few cents, but at the time of writing, there is one banana selling for around $780.
It’s unclear how many bananas are available, but if you head to the market, you’ll see a panda banana, a horse banana, a glitch banana, a unicorn, and many others. In the game, there is also a shop button that will take you to the banana item shop, where you can buy bananas for 25 cents each. Additionally, many of them are only available for a limited time; In early June, the game’s Discord reached 10,000 members, so a 10K celebration banana was dropped into the game for 24 hours.
So part of this player count is people just seeing why everyone is playing to Banana, but a lot of it is people who want to find rare banana loot and sell it on Steam for real-world cash. This will go into your Steam wallets and can be used to purchase 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 issues around bots as the game basically takes 1% or no resources from your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alternate accounts to get rarer drops or at least drops to bulk,” Hery told Polygon.
Either way, developers understand the appeal. “I think the reason it caught on is because it’s an ‘Infinite Money’ loophole,” Hery said. “Users make money with a free game while selling free virtual items.”
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