Let's take a quick look at the current chart of most-played Steam games, shall we? Counter-Strike 2, yep. Dota 2, of course. PUBG and Apex Legends, naturally. Banana? Uhh...what?
It's true: right now, a "game" by the name of Banana is quickly climbing up the Steam most-played charts. According to Steam's own figures, Banana has attracted an eye-watering 252,171 players in the last 24 hours alone.
The mechanics of Banana are incredibly simple; you click the banana and a counter goes up. That's it; that's all there is to the "game". So, why is it so popular? Sadly, the answer is probably more mercenary than you'd hope. It's all down to money.
Here's how it works. Every three hours (rather amusingly, Banana received a recent update putting this limit in place for "bot idling prevention"), you click to secure a banana skin drop. Oh, I see what you did there, Banana.
Every 18 hours, you'll get a rare drop. Effectively, this means that because Banana is free-to-play and requires minimal effort for skin farming, players (and, more to the point, likely a whole heap of bots) are using the "game" to make money.
As pointed out by this rather disgruntled Steam reviewer, the developer also gets a cut of each transaction, and since Banana is so popular, it's likely that a lot of transactions are happening on the game's Steam marketplace right now.
It's worth pointing out that since Banana is basically a meme game, the review rating for the game is sitting at "Very Positive" at time of writing, but many of the positive reviews (if not all of them) are effectively jokes rather than earnest critiques. Yes, I know I'm still talking about a game where you click a banana.
Skin farming in gaming is nothing new; it's a problem that games as high-profile as Counter-Strike have prominently faced in the past.
It's worth noting, though, that because Banana has such low system requirements - it's basically just a JPEG, after all - it has basically nonexistent system requirements, which allows for things like multiple instances running at the same time.
Still, the fact that a "game" in which you literally click a banana, and are rewarded with potentially profitable skins for doing so, is as popular as it is feels pretty depressing to me.
If you'll excuse me, I'm off to play Elden Ring and not farm a single skin.
