The most recent craze among gamers is the Banana game that promises players a lot of money for… clicking on a banana for dozens of hours. It caught on so well that it has now entered Steam’s top 10 most-played games of all time with nearly 850,000 concurrent players.
That puts it in spitting distance of Baldur’s Gate 3, 2023’s biggest game and one that has been in the 10 best-selling games on Steam for nearly a year now. It also crossed Cyberpunk 2077 which had an amazing redemption arc spanning nearly three full years. The reason behind all this is pretty clear: the Banana game promises random drops every three and 18 hours that some players have already been selling for insane amounts of money. One banana item has sold for over $1,000, though the value has been largely dropping with the current most expensive listed item going for about $220.
Some players have been calling the game a scam, including YouTuber Charlie from MoistCritikal, who called the game a “huge Steam scam game,” in his June 16 video. While most of the reviews are positive (and jokes), there are some who feel disgruntled and claim that the developer is “exploiting” users. One review explains how the developer earns a commission from each banana sold. Most bananas will sell for three cents on the Steam market (the minimal value) and the developer gets a cent of that each time. With nearly 900,000 players, according to SteamCharts, the developer might be making upward of $72,000 each day from the three-cent sales on the Steam market.
Valve itself, too, would be making the same amount.
With NFTs and NFT-based games taking a plunge and nearly disappearing from the market, games like the Banana clicker are only a natural continuation of the same idea, though admittedly with way less investment from the end-user.
