That Viral Banana Game Is An Obvious And Shockingly Successful Grift

As I write this, a game titled ‘Banana’ is sitting at the second spot on Steam’s most played games, right under the usual first-place holder, Counter-Strike 2. Open up the Steam page, and you’ll find that Banana is a free-to-play idle clicker. What you do is click the banana – that’s it. There’s no progression or upgrades, you just click. Click the banana enough times, and you’ll get a picture of a banana in your Steam inventory. You can even leave the game open all day with only occasional clicks to mark yourself as still being active in the game and you’ll still gain bananas, albeit at a much slower pace.

The hook here is that the bananas you get might be worth some real-life money on the Steam Marketplace. Most bananas are worth next to nothing, but rare bananas can sell for over a thousand bucks. These reskinned bananas are, according to the Steam page, “made by the community on Discord”. You can also buy specific skins directly from the developers, and the skins available rotate out, though it’s not clear how often.

Ideally, these skins will become more valuable at a later point and net their collectors a lot of money – or at least more than they cost to buy. Naturally, the developers and Valve take a cut of every sale. One developer described the game as “a legal ‘infinite money glitch’” to Polygon.

Unsurprisingly, most of the game’s ‘players’ are actually just bots. According to the developer, when the game hit 141,000 players, two thirds of those were bots. Most people don’t have the time to sit around and farm for banana pictures on the off chance that they’ll get a rare drop, but a lot of people want to get in on the opportunity to make ‘free money’. Stupid.

Did We Already Forget What Happened With NFTs?

There’s a very obvious parallel from recent history here. Remember when everybody was buying and selling pictures of apes for ridiculous prices based on abstract ideas of rarity and the belief that owning an entirely unique set of pixels gave them some sort of cultural clout? And remember when after that, the market crashed and was held up pretty much entirely by bots artificially inflating the prices of these NFTs, which universally plummeted in value as the internet decided it didn’t care about apes anymore?

One major difference is that Banana, as far as we know, doesn’t use the blockchain, and therefore isn’t using up the tons of energy that the technology is wont to do. Does that make it less evil? Surprise: no. There are a lot of shady things about this game that make it shockingly apparent that it’s just a market manipulation, get-rich-quick simulator, but for the devs to profit instead of you.

It Might Not Be A Bitcoin Miner, But Banana Is Shady As Hell

For one, drop rates aren’t made clear to players, which means there isn’t a concrete way to define what a ‘rare’ drop is. We know that skins are being rotated out of the drop pool which technically makes each one limited in supply, but there’s also no way to stop the devs from flooding the marketplace with any skin they choose.

This is because the Steam Marketplace considers the bananas to be ‘commodities’, and so doesn’t show you who is listing what. In theory, the developers can manually generate ultra rare bananas for themselves or their friends, and list them on the Marketplace. Nobody would know!

To make things worse, one of the devs has already been revealed to have been previously involved in another Steam Marketplace scam. Theselions was recently ousted from the Banana team after it was ‘revealed’ (heavy on the quotation marks) that he had used a similar game to run a pump-and-dump scheme on the Marketplace, earning himself a lifetime Steam trade ban. I highly recommend watching YouTuber Jauwn’s video about Banana for more details on that particular scam.

Banana was previously published under aaladin66, but the game is now listed as being published by Sky. We can assume Theselions is aaladin66, and that account also published a game called Lass Ich Sliden which had very much the same concept as Banana, allowing you to farm achievements and marketplace items. I’m seeing a pattern here!

I find it funny that users gave Banana the psychological horror tag, because it definitely horrifies me. Steam players are feeding into one of the most obvious Steam grifts of all time, and Valve doesn’t seem to care very much that this shady, weird clicker ripe for market manipulation, scamming, and maybe even money laundering is sitting near the top of the most played chart. Worse, people are still falling for it.

The best case is that players never spend a cent on the game and waste only their time, but the worst case is that some naive idiot spends a thousand bucks on a picture of a banana that won’t be worth a thing in a couple of months. You’d think we would have learned from NFTs, but apparently, we’re just as stupid as ever.

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