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Banana has been out on Steam for a little while now. It seemingly came out of nowhere, before being catapulted into Steam’s Most Played charts before long. Even now, it’s still only fifth, behind CS2, PUBG, Dota 2, and Elden Ring. You’re probably thinking – what is Banana, and how does it hold up against industry defining titles from Valve and From Software?
Well, Banana is a clicker game. There are two pretty simple mechanics – click banana, receive banana. Every three hours of clicks, you’re awarded a new Banana skin, can be traded on the marketplace for absurdly expensive prices. Some have sold for upwards of $1000, perhaps even more.
The game has been labelled as an ‘infinite money glitch,’ and on its release I even thought it was an impressive feat of tactical marketing and business to catapult the game to success. The developer has said that only a third of the players are in-fact real, while the rest are automated bots.
Thanks to Banana’s success – which is surely generating plenty of revenue for its developers – a new worthless clicker has entered the scene: Tapple. In a game with only three or four different textures, the developers have still had to rely on AI generated assets to hack together a working model. Like Banana, you just click on the on-screen piece of fruit in the hopes of earning a new tradeable cosmetic. You will be able to harness your ‘tapping skills’ to lead to an ‘unimaginable amount of Tapples’ that will ‘automate your income’.
There’s almost 7,000 ‘people’ playing Tapple right now. I’m sure many of which are just bots, though.
NFT’s went out of fashion long ago – Justin Beiber burned over a million dollars on a picture of a monkey, while Logan Paul’s AZUKI is now worth $10. Something tells me that the trading markets set up by Banana and Tapple are not going to be around for much long either. Something bigger, better, and more lucrative will come around, and if you’ve got a silly amount of capital stored in cosmetics for games with no value other than trading, I think you could easily find yourself in trouble.
Steam doesn’t need anymore of these games polluting its storefront. We already have the iOS App Store for a collection of worthless mobile clickers and NFT scams, leave gamers alone.
At least in Tapple, the background colour is less offensive than Banana’s, which looks a bit like the inside of a nappy.
