[STEAM] The Banana Game May Not Be a Scam But It’s Still Not Worth Your Time

[Steam 0]

Quick, you only have a few seconds to answer this question: What games are on Steam’s top 10 concurrent players of all time list? PUBG, yes. Counter-Strike 2, absolutely. Elden Ring, for sure. But if you answered Banana, you would…

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The bizarre indie game that consists of repeatedly clicking on a picture of a banana (and nothing else) has become a sensation, at least in sheer number of alleged players. But if you were thinking of giving it a download and checking it out for yourself, let me give you some advice: don’t bother.

We’ve already covered how the

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work in regards to the percentages the devs and Valve take from each banana transaction, which is now up in the tens of thousands per day. Although the developers have been adamant that Banana is not a scam, and even went through the trouble of

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developer Theselions (their Steam name) because of their previous association with a Bitcoin scam, they don’t seem to have the highest view of their own product. In an interview with

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, developer Hery referred to Banana as a “******* game,” and that the reason it’s become popular is because it’s a “legal infinite money glitch. Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items.”

Banana is exactly what it looks like: a clicking simulator designed to waste your time and maybe convince you to try selling the fruits of your labor It’s a telling admission, but it does nothing to mitigate the underlying issue with exactly this type of “game.” Banana and other games like it skirt by on technicalities and appeals to the absurdity of their premise while still raking in plenty of money for their creators, and Valve does nothing to deal with such shovelware on its platform because it too stands to make a tidy profit from the endeavor. That Hery also admitted during the Polygon interview that a significant chunk of Banana’s player base is made up of bots doesn’t help either. Even though Hery claims the team has contacted Valve for help addressing the **** issue, they have still inflated the game’s player count to give it more visibility on Steam in the short term, enticing even more curious players to give it a try and perhaps be part of a transaction or two.



That attention has caused many to ask just what exactly is going on here, including us at IGN. YouTuber Jauwn did a

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into Banana, including a look at the game’s code. Luckily, there’s no indication that it’s malware, using your computer to mine cryptocurrency, or any other obviously deceptive scheme. Banana is exactly what it looks like: a clicking simulator designed to waste your time and maybe convince you to try selling the fruits of your labor on the store for some cash. But why is it so popular? Once you subtract the bots, are there really that many players who are feeling enough banana-fever to maintain an entire economy around virtual fruits?

As with other recent digital get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs or niche cryptocurrencies, Banana is trying to tap into a meme market. It’s a speculator bubble fueled by misguided hopefuls who think the bananas might be worth something someday, irony-poisoned edgelords who know it won’t but like being in on the joke, and bots that flood the market to make the whole enterprise seem more popular than it actually is. Sure, buying and selling bananas is less harmful than blockchain-based transactions because it isn’t

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to generate these digital tokens, but anyone looking to add bananas to their investment portfolio should reconsider.



The devs have absolute control over how the bananas are distributed, and there’s no way to regulate the digital economy they’ve cultivated. The more players that ***** into Banana, the less likely it is that you’ll manage to ******* one of the coveted rare bananas that have sold for a decent sum. What’s far more likely than us all becoming part of a banana republic is that the game’s 15 minutes of fame will soon wind down and anyone who’s spent real money collecting rare bananas in the hopes of flipping them will be left holding the bag. So heed my warning: do not give in to the call of Banana. Don’t reward low effort nonsense like this with your valuable time, because when you start clicking the banana, the only game really being played is on you.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on

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