Banana, a fruit-themed clicker game, is topping Steam’s charts and beating out major titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Apex Legends. Read on to learn how this game managed to rack up so many players in such a short amount of time.
Banana Clicker Game Tops Steam’s Charts
Stands at the 4th Highest Concurrent Player Count
Banana, an odd fruit-themed clicker game, is taking Steam’s charts by storm with a massive player count of roughly 250,000. First released on April 23, 2024, this surprisingly colossal game has overtaken other chart-toppers like Baldur’s Gate 3, Call of Duty, Naraka: Bladepoint, Rust, and even Apex Legends.
Although this ranks the game at 42nd place in terms of all-time peak concurrent player count, considering recent player counts for the platform’s usual big-hitters, Banana is currently the 4th most played game on Steam, bested only by PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2.
Despite how the game markets itself on Steam, Banana is not a clicker game in the traditional sense. Unlike Hyper Hippo Games’ AdVenture Capitalist or Playsaurus’ Cookie Clicker, there are no ways to improve the potency, frequency, or variety of your clicks. You simply click the still image of a banana and the counter above it goes up by one. There are no other gameplay assets present apart from a pause menu with resolution settings.
Even though there's an obvious potential virality for memes alone, it’s hard to imagine how such a barebones game could garner such a following. However, the game’s one other mechanic shed some light on its explosive popularity. As the game’s official description on Steam helpfully reveals, playing this game for hours at a time has the potential to earn you some money.
Money for Clicks in the Steam Community Market
One of Banana’s defining gameplay features is the generation of a distinct Banana Skin for every 3-18 hours of playtime. Said Banana Skin can be sold on the Steam Community Market for real Steam Wallet credits, allowing dutiful players to legitimately earn enough Steam Wallet credits to buy themselves another game. The price of each Banana Skin varies depending on its rarity, with most Banana Skins going for a few cents at a time.
The prospect of easy money through clicks is likely to be the reason behind the game’s sudden rise through the charts, although that’s not where the rabbit hole ends. As pointed out in one of the game’s many negative reviews and corroborated by the developers themselves sometime later, every transaction involving the Banana Skins in the Steam Community Market has a kickback of a few cents to the developers.
Individually, this is a negligible amount of money, but considering the game’s number of concurrent players, this has the potential to earn the developers far more money than any player who chooses to play this game for hours.
The similarity between this game’s generation of sellable in-game assets and the now-dead NFT fad is undeniable, although, at the time of writing, there has not been any indication if the developers have broken Steam’s strict ban against NFTs and blockchain-based games.
Only time will tell if Banana will stay atop Steam’s Most-Played charts as it has shown no signs of stopping since it was released. It’s difficult to outright call this game a scam, but considering that its mechanics involve real money, it’s better to be informed.
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