You may have noticed that the second most played game on Steam is Banana, which was released back in April, but has seen an explosion in popularity over the past few weeks. What is a banana? It’s a free idle clicker where you click on the banana image to increase the numbers. If the count increases enough, the game will add more banana images to your Steam inventory. It’s not even an idle clicker, actually – simply leaving the game open all day is enough to create a slow but steady supply of these banana images.
There are a variety of banana images, some animated, from crystal bananas to uwu bananas to banana black holes, all “made by the community on Discord,” according to the Steam page. Banana images can be sold on the Steam Marketplace, with the developers (and Valve) taking a cut from each sale. Most of them sell for pennies, but there are a few that trade for significant sums. At the time of writing, there are four “Crypticnanas” on Marketplace, reportedly costing £1335.09 per peel. A homemade ‘Thickglassnana’ 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 commercial element, of course, that underpins Banana’s popularity – that and a handful of FOMO, a love of shiny objects, and the faint hope, especially among desperate video game journalists, that Banana might turn out to be something more than it is. To their credit, the game’s creators aren’t making any grandiose Curiosity-Cube-style promises. Speaking to Polygon, one of the developers, Hery, openly described Banana as “legal ‘endless money.’
As you might expect from a legal issue with infinite money, Banana has a huge problem with botting, and Hery is also open about it. “Since the game takes basically one percent to none of your PC’s resources, 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, around 94,000 of the game’s approximately 141,000 players were bots. Today, the game peaked at 875,542 users.
The developers say they’re trying to get Valve to crack down on bots, but it seems obvious to me that Banana was designed with that outcome in mind. There have been arguments that Banana is a straight-up scam of sorts – I’m not sure if it meets any specific legal definition, but with its enticing fruit designs and promise of instant riches, it’s certainly aimed at players who fall victim to scams. It’s no big surprise that one of its creators, Theselions, has been involved in risky cryptocurrency scams, though Banana doesn’t seem to be leaving the blockchain itself.
“As you’ve all heard, Theselions used to be involved in a Bitcoin scam/bug on the Steam market,” team co-owner aestheticspartan revealed on Discord via Eurogamer yesterday. “We didn’t know about it until the recent videos started to highlight it and we spoke to the whole team about the situation almost immediately. We gave him a chance to explain the situation to us and we know he’s showing remorse and I’m sorry for what happened in the past .” Theselions and the Banana team have now split up.
That’s pretty much all there is to know about Banana at the time of publication. I sincerely hope this is the only article I write about this matter, but I’m sure I just messed up by writing these words. A glimmer of hope is that players on Steam seem very alive to Banana’s essential banality and emptiness, to the point that some play it for the thrill of being the butt of a joke: one of the most popular user tags for the game is “psychological horror “.
Updated June 20, 2024: Did I write “that’s pretty much all there is to know about the banana”? That was before I watched Jauwn’s deep dive into its workings and origins, which clearly shows that the whole thing is dark as hell. Do not approach. Thanks to KDR_11k for the pass.