Bare bones Steam item generator Banana rakes in over 100,000 concurrents in the span of a few days—reaches top 10 on Steam's 'most played'

GamesBare bones Steam item generator Banana rakes in over 100,000 concurrents in the span of a few days—reaches top 10 on Steam’s ‘most played’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: SteamDB / aaladin66, Pony, Sky, AestheticSpartan)

A banana from Banana, rendered above a SteamDB chart.

Dear reader, I made the mistake of having a day off this week—and, like a time traveller stepping on a butterfly, I might have set a series of dominoes in motion. Either that or we’ve just collectively lost our grip on reality. Banana, a game Icovered last week, has completely exploded in popularity.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Banana is a clicker game that’s not really playedinthe client itself. The actual .exe is extremely bare-bones, featuring a glossy .png of a banana, the ability to click it and make a number go up, and nothing else.

The real pulp of the ‘nana, if you will, is in the game’s bustling Steam item economy. These items, which can be traded and sold for cash in your Steam wallet, typically go for mere cents on the market (though rare bananas will sell for quite a bit more).

Initially resting at a cosy34,000 concurrents, which my silly, naive self thought was impressive a week ago, Banana began to accelerate at a rate of roughly 25,000 additional concurrent players every 24 hours. Then on Thursday, June 6, at midnight UTC, the numbers began to explode like the volcano over Pompeii—with Banana shooting from 84,000 to 134,000 concurrent users in the space of 11 hours.

At the time of writing, Banana currently has 30,000 more people playing it than Elden Ring, a game that has a ton of hype behind its upcoming DLC—shoot, maybe weshould be playing Banana instead.

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Looking at the game’sSteam forumsdoesn’t give me too much hope for innocence right now, either—Banana just isn’t pulling 100,000+ numbers of community buzz. At the time of writing, the oldest post on the first page of the Banana forum was five hours ago. Contrast that to, say, Elden Ring—whose oldest post on its first page is less than one hour old.

The game’s Discord community, which is where you have to go to engage with the actual Banana metagame, also has around 15,000 members at the time of writing. Which is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also only 11% of the playerbase.

Thanks to the bot in the Discord’s welcome channel, we can also see that pre-surge numbers from Monday of this week were around 11,500, give-or-take, so the increase in Discord users hasn’t been proportional. Usually that wouldn’t be suspect, but I cannot emphasise how little of a game there actually is to be played on Steam, here. Community and flogging your wares is the entire point of the thing, and if the Discord isn’t proportionately active, and the forums aren’t proportionately active, then who’s flying the airplane?

This is all conjecture at this point, but still. Nonetheless, I have made efforts to try and reach out to the developer via the game’s Discord, and I’ll update this story if I receive a response.

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