Banana
The situation over at Steam regarding the game Banana is spiraling a bit out of control. Three days ago, I wrote about how the game’s playercount was exploding, up to 420,000 concurrent players a night. Now, it’s doubled, up to 847,000 players as of a few hours ago. If this pace continues, in a few more days it might top Counter-Strike 2 at 1.5 million concurrent. Impossible? No, certainly not when it keeps increasing exponentially like this.
The absurdity of this is that this is a game where you do absolutely nothing but click a banana. It keeps track of your number of clicks. That’s it. Yes, there have been clicker games in the past by the hundred, but this is not that. Rather, it’s something else. It’s a money printer, and it’s being positively swarmed by bots.
What’s going on here is wild, and it’s unclear whether Steam is going to feel the need to step in here and do something. The game is described by its own creator as a “legal money printer.” The one aspect of the game that exists outside of clicking is that every so often, you will get a banana skin. A skin that is sellable on the Steam marketplace. Most skins sell for three cents or so, though some have sold for hundreds or even under a thousand.
But the skin-selling idea just…generates money for all parties. If a skin is sold for three cents, the player gets a penny, the developer gets a penny and Steam gets a penny, thereabouts. Now multiply this by a zillion transactions and you get where things are going here.
Banana
The obvious thing going on here, however, is that this is not players sitting around clicking manually to earn pennies, for the most part. Rather, this game is being mined by thousands of bots to automate this process and generate income that way. The developer said recently they’ve talked to Valve about clearing out bots, which represented two-thirds of players a week or two ago, but now with these exploding numbers, it’s likely much more than that.
The question now is…where does it end? Yes, this is all “legal,” it seems, within Steam policies, and Valve itself is making money from these micro and macro sale. But does Steam want its #1 game to be a bot-farmed banana clicker? Does it want to spawn a hundred copies of the same concept to try to flood the board with more “money printers”?
So far nothing has changed. The playercount continues to skyrocket, almost certainly on the backs of bots, and there have been no rulings issued to stop it. Again, if nothing changes, expect this to cross a million concurrent players (“players”) probably by tomorrow, and more clones to start popping up. I have to believe something will be done, but Valve has been quiet so far. It’s a really bizarre situation.
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