Summary
A game called Banana has been skyrocketing upSteam’smost-played list. It has an incredibly, unbelievably simple premise - you click a banana and a number goes up. No animations, no unlocks, nothing. But occasionally you get an item that you can sell on the marketplace, and therein lies the hook.
As reported byPolygon, most of these are worth mere cents. You could sit and click that banana for hours and make less than $1. But bizarrely, there are incredibly rare bananas selling for as much as $1,378.
On the Steam Community Market right now, people are selling bananas for as much as £776.
UnlikeCounter-Strike, which often sells skins for ludicrous amounts of money (one cosmetic even sold for over $1 million last week), you don’t have to pay anything to get in on the action. Banana is completely free, skins drop for free, and selling on the marketplace is free. So, it’s a legal money farm.
A Lot Of Banana’s Players Are Bots
While this very simple game is going viral at the moment, a good chunk of its player base are bots. Developer Hery told Polygon that last week, when Banana hit 141,000 players (a number that has since shot up to over 250,000), only a third of those were real. The majority were bots.
We are currently facing some problems around botting.
Hery says that the team aren’t sitting idly while this happens, however, and that they have contacted Valve to find a solution. “Unfortunately, we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically one percent to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1,000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk.”
Given how lucrative the rare skins are, it’s no wonder so many people are flocking to Banana in hopes of making a quick buck. Whose buying them is the big question, but people spending outrageous amounts on pixels isn’t unheard of, just look at the now-collapsed NFT market.
Steam
Owned by Valve, Steam is a digital storefront and library for PC games. With many sales, updates, account functionality, and compatibility with many different platforms — as well as streaming options and its own Steam Deck handheld - it remains one of the biggest storefronts for PC gamers.
