Quick, you only have a few seconds to answer this question: Which games are on Steam’s top 10 concurrent players list of all time? PUBG, yes. Counter-Strike 2, absolutely. Elden Ring, for sure. But if you answered Banana, you would… be fair too. The quirky indie game, which consists of repeatedly clicking on a picture of a banana (and nothing else), has become a sensation, at least among the large number of supposed players. But if you’ve been thinking about downloading it and checking it out for yourself, let me give you a word of advice: don’t bother.
Banana is not the first game of its kind; the almost identical game Egg was released earlier this year in February and a new contender Cats came after the release of Banana in April. All of these games follow the same format of pointlessly clicking on an image for no apparent reason other than to increase the click counter and get a Steam item at certain intervals. In Banana’s case, players are rewarded for their clicks with different digital bananas every three hours, many of which are common, but some of which are quite rare. Players can also purchase bananas directly from the in-game store, but the available bananas are changed at the discretion of the developers.
And therein lies Banana’s true purpose: artificially generating an economy for worthless digital “goods”. Now, to be clear, the banana is not technically fraud. The game is free to play and doesn’t make you monetize if you don’t want to. You can download it, spend a few minutes indulging your fruit-clicking urge, and then uninstall it without spending a cent. Unlike many free-to-play games that find ways to limit or annoy players enough that they spend money to ease the friction, Banana doesn’t really have gameplay that limits. You click and the number increases. The number isn’t even saved across game sessions, meaning it resets every time you shut down the game. The digital bananas you receive are dropped straight into your Steam account and seem to serve no purpose other than the sheer euphoria of owning them and being able to sell bananas to other players.
We’ve already looked at how banana economy work regarding the percentages developers and Valve take from each banana transaction, which now run into the tens of thousands per day. Although the developers have been adamant that Banana is not a scam and have even had issues with disposal developer Theselions (their Steam name) due to their previous association with a Bitcoin scam, they don’t seem to have the highest opinion of their own product. In an interview with A polygon, developer Herry called Banana a “stupid game” and that the reason it became popular was because it was a “legitimate infinite money problem”. Users make money from free game while selling free virtual items.
It’s a telling admission, but it does nothing to mitigate the underlying problem with this very type of “game”. Banana and other games like it bypass the technicalities and address the absurdity of their premise while making a lot of money for their creators, and Valve does nothing to deal with such shovels on its platform, because it can also make a clean profit from the venture. That Hery also admitted during the Polygon interview that a significant portion of Banana’s player base is made up of bots doesn’t help either. Although Hery claims that the team contacted Valve for help in solving the bot issue, they still increased the number of players in the game to give it more visibility on Steam in the short term, luring even more curious players to try and maybe participate in a transaction or two.
This attention has left many wondering what exactly is going on here, including us at IGN. YouTuber Jauwn made a deep diving in Banana, including a review of the game’s code. Fortunately, there are no indications that this is malware using your computer to mine cryptocurrency or any other obviously fraudulent scheme. Banana is exactly what it sounds like: a clicker simulator designed to waste your time and maybe convince you to try selling the fruits of your labor in the store for a little money. But why is it so popular? Once you take out the bots, are there really that many players experiencing enough banana fever to support an entire economy around virtual fruit?
As with other recent digital get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs or niche cryptocurrencies, Banana is trying to tap into the meme market. It’s a speculative bubble fueled by delusional hopefuls who think bananas might be worth something someday, irony-poisoned lords who know they won’t but want in on the joke, and bots flooding the market to make making the whole enterprise appear more popular than it really is. Of course, buying and selling bananas is less harmful than blockchain-based transactions because it is not burning the planet to generate these digital tokens, but anyone looking to add bananas to their investment portfolio should reconsider.
The developers have absolute control over how the bananas are distributed and there is no way to regulate the digital economy they have cultivated. The more players dive into Banana, the less likely you are to be able to grab one of the coveted rare bananas that sell for a decent amount. What’s far more likely than us all becoming part of a banana republic is that the game’s 15 minutes of fame will soon be over, and anyone who spent real money collecting rare bananas in hopes of dropping them, will be left holding the bag. So heed my warning: don’t give in to Banana’s call. Don’t reward such low-effort nonsense with your precious time, because when you start clicking on the banana, the only game that’s really being played is for you.
Carlos Morales writes Mass Effect novels, articles, and essays. You can follow his fixations Twitter.
