If you regularly check Steam listings to see if there's anything new and exciting to play, you may have noticed a strange little “game” called Banana. It has quickly become a huge success and, at the time of writing, sits at number three with over 400,000 concurrent players. It's a simple idle clicking game, like many before it, so what makes players flock to what amounts to a static screen of a huge banana?
The promise of sweet, sweet cash, that is. It's an extremely basic title where you have to repeatedly click on a banana. That's practically all, although there is a twist. When you click and click on the tropical fruit, there is a chance that a banana sticker will appear in your Steam inventory. These bananas come in different designs, from silver-encrusted variants to one that looks like it came from a trick.
Because bananas appear in your inventory, they can be sold on the Steam Marketplace. Rare bananas have already sold for up to $1,400, although the average payout is in the $0.02 range. One of the developers called it an “infinite money glitch” in a Interview with Polygon. “Users make money with a free game while selling free virtual items,” she continued.
The money earned goes into a Steam wallet, which can then be used to purchase games. So these bananas are basically nfts, just without blockchain. People buy and sell them like crazy, like strange fruit-based trading cards. Forget the banana stand – there seems to be money in just one copy of a banana.
If the idea of spending all day clicking on a fake banana in front of a vomit-green background doesn't convince you, the developers sell inventory bananas directly for $0.25 each. The game itself, however, is free. The developers deny accusations that the clicker It's some kind of scam or a Ponzi scheme, saying simply that it is “a practically stupid game.” After all, idle clickers are nothing new.
As for the future, the designers have teased updates, including a way to use inventory items to change the appearance of the plain banana in the game. There could also be a minigame on the way, as well as a store update that allows players to trade multiples of the same banana for a single delivery. One thing is almost certain. The enormous popularity of Banana It will surely inspire plenty of imitators. May I humbly suggest a slice of pizza as something to click on again and again?
