After reaching its peak in June 2024, Banana on Steam has since experienced a decrease in concurrent players. Read on to learn more about its popularity and player decline.
Banana Game Steam Charts Show Massive Decline
It’s a Clicker Game About Bananas…
Banana on Steam launched on April 23, 2024, and this seemingly simplistic clicker game skyrocketed to prominence, to the point that it achieved an all-time peak of 917,272 players in June 2024. However, the game has yet to reach those numbers again. In fact, according to SteamDB, it saw a significant decline from November 2024 up to now.
To those unfamiliar, Banana is a free-to-play clicker game that defies gaming conventions. Launched in April 2024, the game is… minimalistic, to say the least. The gameplay revolves around players clicking a banana image then clicking it once more and clicking it again. But its draw lies not in its gameplay but in the potential financial incentives. Players can acquire virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market, with some rare items fetching substantial sums. For instance, a "Special Golden Banana" once sold for $1,378.58.
The game’s meteoric rise can be attributed to several factors. Initially, the allure of earning Steam Wallet funds through minimal effort drew in a significant number of players, with team developer Hery even going so far as to describe the game as a "legal ‘Infinite money glitch,’ in an interview with Polygon in June 2024." However, this surge in popularity also attracted automated bots designed to farm these valuable drops. As such, it artificially inflated the game’s player count.
"Unfortunately, we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC," Hery told Polygon. "People are abusing up to 1,000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk."
The developers implemented bot prevention measures in May 2024, and it is currently unknown if its 100,000+ players are genuine. But the game’s concurrent player count did experience a sharp decline post-peak. By July 2024, the average number of players had decreased to 549,091 players. This downward trend continued in the subsequent months, with November 2024 witnessing a huge drop from 400,000 to just above 100,000. Despite the game momentarily doubling its player count at the start of 2025, it has yet to rebound from this decline ever since.
Banana is currently holding strong with 112,966 concurrent players and even ranks 7th on Steam's Most Played Games list. However, a significant drop to around 50,000 players was observed yesterday, March 16th, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The reason for this sudden dip is unclear, and it's difficult to determine if bots were involved. Regardless, the general trend of decreasing player counts is likely due to the game's initial novelty waning.
The developers have been regularly updating the game, with trading cards, event drops, and quality-of-life updates. They also engaged the community by allowing user-generated banana art through the Steam Workshop, with creators earning a percentage of sales. Whether these will help the game regain its zenith without the assistance of bots remains unlikely.
Sources:
Polygon | Why clicker game Banana — the ‘legal infinite money glitch’ — is going viral on Steam
Banana Game’s Bot Prevention Patch Note
