Hundreds of Thousands of People or Bots Speculate on Banana Images on Steam

More than 850,000 users on Steam or bots are currently clicking on the image of a banana. The success of the clicker game Banana, in which a German developer is also involved, raises questions because it targets the dark patterns of FOMO, hype and memes.

A few days ago, a game called Banana suddenly became very popular on Steam. The game currently has the second-highest CCU numbers on Steam in the last 24 hours, well ahead of Dota 2, PUBG and Apex Legends. It is a free-to-play clicker game in which you click on a banana - and a counter counts up. And that's it. Almost. "Every 3 and 18 hours, you get dropped a banana," write the developers. "Each banana is also made by the community in discord."

These bananas are not Steam trading cards, they are items that go into the Steam account inventory and can then be sold on the community marketplace. As the rarity of the bananas varies, they can sometimes sell for surprisingly high amounts of money on the marketplace. For example, the Crypticnana banana, which is limited to 25 pieces, sells for over 1000 Euros, with automatic orders starting at over 700 Euros. It can be assumed that these banana items are being speculated on in order to get as much money as possible for rarer bananas. However, most common items trade for much, much less. These items are just pictures that cannot be used as skins in the game at the moment, although there are skins that are sold in the game for 0.25 Euros each.

The game had over 858,915 concurrent active users yesterday, all hoping for banana drops. However, the majority of "players" are probably bots, as the developers confirmed in an interview with Polygon. When the CCU was at 141,000, it was said that a third of these players were real people. And using bots is very easy because the game uses almost no system resources and has literally no gameplay. The hope is to get the rarest bananas possible, which can then be sold at a high price. By the way: According to the EULA, cheating and botting are not allowed. The developers are said to have contacted Valve Software to find a solution to the "botting problem".

The development team of Banana consists of four people spread around the world, from South America to Germany, according to the Polygon interview. They were reluctant to reveal how much money they have made from the item store, but it should be noted that they will also receive a cut of sales from the marketplace - just like Valve as the platform operator. Polygon: "Several folks on the Banana Discord and Steam forums have speculated about the validity of the game - is it some sort of scam? A Ponzi scheme? Something to do with cryptocurrency or NFTs? A play for the developer just to make money? Is there something hidden in the game? You can understand why people would be wary. It's weird. Hery [one of the developers] said the team disagrees with all those assessments. It's just a dumb game with bananas."

"I do believe that the reason why it mostly caught on is because it's a legal 'Infinite money glitch," said one of the developers in this Polygon interview. "Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items."

The whole thing is reminiscent of NFTs, but without blockchain. It's just pictures as items that are traded on the Steam marketplace. Basically, everything in the game is free and of course nobody has to buy any banana pictures at a high price, but due to FOMO aspects (fear of missing out) or the hype/meme wave, people could be tempted to spend money, which could make the whole situation interesting for the protection of minors. Incidentally, the first game from the development team was "Lass ich Sliden", which costs 0.99 Euros. It features an open world and 100 achievements that can be used to quickly increase the level of your Steam account. It's no wonder that accusations of scam have been made.

At the same time, similar clicker games on Steam are experiencing an enormous user rush, be it Egg (the "playful" model for Banana), Cats or Cucumber.

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