Why viral clicker Banana continues to dominate Steam charts, spawning a slew of imitators

Since June, one of the most popular games on Steam isn’t a game at all: just click a banana and the number goes up.

At its peak, the game, called Bananaopen on their computers. Every now and then, Banana drops a Steam item into the player’s inventory — one of dozens of specially decorated bananas. You only need to click every so often to get these sporadic drops, so all these players weren’t necessarily actively clicking their bananas, but simply had the program open. Although Banana’Even though the number of concurrent players has dropped by hundreds of thousands, the game has not fallen out of the top five most popular games on Steam, with an average of over 300,000 players at any given time.

Why is it popular? Because bananas have value on Steam. In an interview with Polygon, community manager Hery said it was basically a legal “infinite money bug.” Most bananas are worth pennies, but they’re still pennies that you can spend on the Steam store. Many of the rarer bananas currently sell for around a hundred dollars, while a few bananas used to sell for thousands. Hery also told Polygon that when the game first started, a vast portion of its concurrent users were bots, which likely helped the game’s rapid rise on the Steam charts. But once people knew about it, A lot Many real gamers also got involved.

BananaThe success inspired a wave of imitators: now you can click on butts, watches, cats, dogs, raspberries, milk, and melons. The premise is the same for all of these games—they generate items in your Steam inventory of varying rarities. The money you earn is negligible, but it’s still money you can spend on the Steam store. There are at least four dozen of these types of clicker games were available for mostly free on Steam, but that wasn’t Banana that started the trend. It was eggwhich was released in February. Its trajectory — as with other copies — is similar to BananaPeople started playing egg as a meme (free money!) attracting more people what the hell factor of all this, on top of the bots. These games are largely harmless unless you actually spend hundreds on a dressed banana thinking it will make you thousands of dollars, like a non-blockchain NFT.

ON BananaClimbing to the top, the developers have been accused of a number of things: Is this some kind of scam? An NFT project? Does it contain malware? Is it powered by bots? The developers’ answer to all of these questions — except bots — is no. It hasn’t always been velvety (the team removed a developer from the project amid various allegations of fraud), but Banana is not a scam.

Photo: Joss/Limsod Games

But there are still plenty of bots, as with many other games on Steam, including Counter Strike Global Offensive AND Team Fortress 2 — Valve’s own game. (This is more of a problem with games like Team Fortress 2 Or Counter Strike Global Offensive because they affect other players—bots fill the lobby to earn items.) Keeg estimated that 40% Banana’The current user base is bots. At the time of writing, Banana has over 450,000 players, so that’s about 180,000 bots running the game just for the drops. Keeg said they’ve eliminated a lot of the bots, but that’s still a problem when it comes to gauging the game’s actual popularity. If Keeg’s estimate is correct, that means there are 270,000 actual players running Banana currently, which would keep him in third place among simultaneous players, ahead of Ring of Fire. Again, Banana doesn’t require constant clicking – just from time to time. So you can have Banana open, using so few resources that you could work or play another game — Ring of Firefor example.

The game’s developers are focusing on updates such as item crafting, mystery cases, and item pool changes, according to the update on Steam. They also worked on up-to-date bananas while removing venerable ones based on copyrighted material – one banana, Amazin’Horsenana, was used Badgers animator and creator MrWeel’s Amazing Horse art without permission. It has been replaced. The team also recruited players into the mix, giving others a chance to make money Bananas; using the Steam Workshop, people can submit their own banana artwork. The community votes on what will be adoptedSold bananas bring the creator 25% of the sale, which equates to 25 cents. Banana item shop. BananaThe game has had a fairly vigorous art community on Discord since its inception, but this change means others will be able to benefit from the game’s viral success as well.

“We all became friends through this project and ultimately I think it gave people a little bit of a break from the craziness that’s going on in the world,” Keeg said. “I know some of the original team had a bad reputation, but after dealing with them, I’m really proud of the whole team for pushing to make the game better. The original project was just haha ​​bananas fun click click click. Now that we’ve partnered with Razer, we’re starting to work with social media influencers like Ricky Berwick to do collaborations, it’s surreal.”