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There’s a game on Steam now: Banana, it’s called. Over 300,000 ‘people’ are playing now, which it makes it the fourth most popular game on the platform. Now, I said people like that, because the reality is that a majority of players are in-fact bots clicking it out against each other to earn the valuable cosmetics worth up to $1,000.
When I look at a game like Banana, all I can think of is the absolute genius behind its creators. I’m imagining four Bond villains sitting around a diamond table, stroking furry companions on their laps, and plotting out a mastermind marketing strategy on a whiteboard. The game offers nothing: click banana, receive banana, yet it’s beating out titles such as GTA V, Elden Ring, and Helldivers 2. It’s deviously simple – almost satirical.
Banana put itself at the top of Steam’s charts by making use of the platform’s cosmetic and collectibles system. Valve’s games have proven out a pretty sinister microtransaction system, and Counter Strike in particular has proven the worth of in-game cosmetic markets. Last week, we saw the sale of a CS2 skin for more than $1m, with the game’s market cap over $3.5bn, and Banana seems to be touching on the same ground here.
Banana differs, slightly. Whereas the bar for entry in Counter Strike cosmetics is spending your own money, the clicker game is entirely free, with skins dropped every three hours. This means that you can’t buy skins in bulk, and the only way to earn them is to keep the game open. Essentially, it’s a real life infinite money glitch, and it works – people are buying.
Speaking to The Gamer, developer Hery has said that they “are currently facing some problems around botting,” and are in contact with Valve to sort this out.
Banana is different to the NFT craze we saw during lockdown. It somehow seems less like nonsense, and a fairly low-risk way to experiment with marketplace trading without having to spend hundreds to get hundreds back.
It doesn’t surprise me that this banana game has gone bananas at all. This is a carefully executed plan, and I give kudos to its perpetrators for turning clicking bananas into a profitable ‘game’.
