You may have noticed that the second most played game on Steam right now is Banana, which was released in April but has seen an explosion of popularity in recent weeks. What is banana? It’s a free idle clicker in which you click on an image of a banana to increase the numbers. If the number increases enough, the game will place additional images of bananas in your Steam inventory. Actually, it’s not even an idle clicker; simply leaving the game open all day is enough to generate a slow but steady supply of these banana pictures.
There are several banana images, some animated, from crystalline bananas to uwu bananas to banana black holes, all “created by the community in Discord” according to the Steam page. The banana images can be sold on the Steam Marketplace, with the developers (and Valve) getting a cut of each sale. Most sell for pennies, but there are a few that trade for significant sums. At the time of writing, there are four “Crypticnanas” on the Marketplace supposedly costing £1335.09 per peel. The homely “Thickglassnana”, meanwhile, can be yours for just 71p, which is about the price of a bunch of tasty, potassium-rich, real bananas from Sainsburys.
It’s the trading element, of course, that underlies the popularity of the Banana game – this and a dash of FOMO, a love of shiny objects and a faint hope, especially among desperate video game journalists, that Banana might be something more than it is . To their credit, the makers of the game don’t make any grand Curiosity-Cube-like promises. One of the developers, Hery, openly described Banana as “a legal ‘infinite money glitch'” in conversation with Polygon.
As you’d expect from a legally infinite money problem, Banana has a huge botching problem, and Hery is upfront about this as well. “Since the game basically takes up one percent to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1,000 alternate accounts to get rarer drops or at least bulk drops,” they told Polygon. At one point last week, about 94,000 of the game’s roughly 141,000 players were bots. Today the game peaked at 875,542 users.
The developers say they’re trying to get Valve to control the bots, but it seems clear to me that Banana was designed with this outcome in mind. There have been arguments that Banana is an outright scam. I’m not sure if it meets any particular legal definition, but with its tasty, boring fruit designs and promise of instant riches, it’s certainly aimed at bringing in the kind of player who falls victim to scams. It’s no big surprise that one of the creators, Theselions, has been involved in dodgy cryptocurrency shenanigans, although Banana itself doesn’t seem to be disappearing from the blockchain.
“As you’ve all heard by now, Theselion was involved in a ‘bitcoin’ scam/bug on the steam market,” the team’s co-owner, aestheticspartan, revealed on Discord yesterday, via Eurogamer. “We knew nothing about this until recent videos started to make this clear and we almost immediately had a conversation with the entire team about the situation. We gave him the opportunity to explain the situation to us and we know he is remorseful and does so.” sorry for what happened in the past.” Theselions and the Banana team have now parted ways.
That’s pretty much all there is to know about Banana at the time of publication. I honestly hope this is the only piece I write about this, but I’m sure I fooled myself by writing these words. The glimmer of hope is that Steam players seem to be very sensitive to Banana’s essential banality and blandness, to the point that some play it for the thrill of being the butt of the joke: one of the most popular user tags for the game is ‘psychological’. horror”.
Update June 20, 2024: Did I write “that’s pretty much all there is to know about Banana”? That was before I saw Jauwn’s deep dive into its mechanics and origins, which makes it clear that the whole thing is dark as hell. Stay out. Thanks KDR_11k for reporting it.