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 in popularity over the past few weeks. What is a banana? This is a free idle clicker where you click on a picture of a banana to increase the numbers. If the count gets high enough, the game drops additional banana photos into your Steam inventory. In fact, it’s not even an idle clicker – just leaving the game open all day is enough to generate a slow but steady supply of those banana shots.
There are various pictures of bananas, some animated, from crystal bananas to uwu bananas to banana black holes, all “made by the Discord community,” according to the Steam page. Photos of the bananas can be sold on the Steam Marketplace, with the developers (and Valve) taking a cut of each sale. Most of them sell for pennies, but there are rare ones that trade for significant sums. At the time of writing, there are four ‘Crypticnanas’ on the market, which are thought to be going for £1335.09 per bark. Meanwhile, a homemade ‘Thickglassnana’ can be yours for just 71p, which is around the price of a bunch of delicious, potassium-rich real bananas from Sainsburys.
The trading element, of course, is at the heart of the Banana game’s popularity—that, and a dose of FOMO, the 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 don’t make Curiosity-Cube-style grandiose promises. One of the developers, Hery, openly described Banana as a “legitimate ‘Infinite Money Problem'” in a conversation with Polygon.
As you would expect from a legal bug with infinite money, Banana has a huge botting problem and Hery is bravely open about it as well. “Because the game takes basically one percent to no resources on 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 approximately 141,000 players were bots. Today, the game reached its peak of 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 are arguments that Banana is an outright scam of some sort – I’m not sure it meets any particular legal definition, but with its appetizingly dumb fruit designs and promise of instant riches, it’s certainly aimed at attracting players who fall prey to frauds. It’s no big surprise that one of its creators, Theselions, has been involved in fraudulent cryptocurrency manipulation, although Banana itself doesn’t seem to be running away from the blockchain.
“As you’ve all heard by now, Theselions have been involved in a scam/bug on the Steam Bitcoin Market,” team co-owner aestheticspartan revealed on Discord yesterday, via Eurogamer . “We didn’t know about it until the recent videos started pointing to it and almost immediately we talked to the whole team about the situation. We gave him a chance to explain the situation to us and we know that he shows remorse and is sorry for what happened in the past.” Theselions and the Banana team have now parted ways.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about Banana at the time of publication. I sincerely hope this is the only piece I write about this thing, but I’m sure I just freaked out writing these words. The glimmer of hope is that Steam players seem very alive to Banana’s underlying 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.”
Update June 20, 2024: Did I write “this is pretty much all you need to know about bananas”? That was before I watched Jauwn’s deep dive into his work and background, which clearly shows that the whole thing is shady as hell. Stay away. Thanks to KDR_11k for passing it on.
