That’s one of the strangest titles I’ve written in a long time, but it’s the way of the world. In recent days, a bizarre game on Steam has snowballed in popularity – Banana. The premise of this game is that players click on a banana until they earn new bananas. That’s it. But there’s a huge twist at play – users will periodically earn random banana skins (that’s clever) of varying rarities with which they can turn a profit, selling them in Steam’s marketplace to other users.
The problem is, that the developer has recognised that the vast majority of the 700,000 peak players recorded on Banana are bots. With this game using ‘less than 1%’ of your computer’s resources, people are setting up thousands of fake profiles to run this clicking-based game in the hope of securing and selling rare banana skins, which are quickly growing in value.
Secure the Skins
Presently, the most expensive banana skins to be sold on the marketplace have reached more than $1,000, which is why users with armies of bot accounts are getting involved. In an interview with Polygon, the game’s developer admitted it’s a ‘legal infinite money glitch’, and the team was pondering how long it’ll take before Valve steps in to shut the game down.
Here’s the gameplay loop:
- Open Banana
- Click the on-screen banana
- Earn drops
- That’s it
In the interview, the developer confirmed that when the player count was 141,000, only a third of those players were real. The rest were bots. While most users are selling their banana skins for single-digit cents, some have made hundreds of dollars through Banana. Also, the developer is pushing the community engagement aspect of the game, stressing that users are contributing their designs to the pot, which is indefinitely increasing the number of banana skins available for unlock.
On Steam, Banana is ranking higher than Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends, and GTA 5 in terms of its overall player count, even if the majority of those ‘players’ are bots driven by auto-clicking functions.
What a world.
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