Banana, a game about repeatedly clicking a banana is currently the second most-played title on Steam, surpassing the likes of PUBG, Destiny 2, Dota 2 or Elden Ring. Thegame,and I use that term very loosely, is the latest attempt at trying to exploit Steam’s marketplace in order to make a quick buck. While there have been many similar attempts in the past, this one is proving to be surprisingly successful.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
You might be wondering why everyone is playing Banana all of a sudden, an idle clicker with literally no gameplay. The answer is simple – money. Banana is essentially a meme game designed to make the people running it a bunch of cash. The game itself is irrelevant, as the sole reason why around half a million people are clicking furiously right now is to get their paws on some juicy banana skins they can sell on the Steam marketplace. These skins have a guaranteed chance to drop as long as you boot up the game and click on the banana every once in a while.
Since this isn’t a real game, you won’t actually be able to equip said skins on the banana. That functionality hasn’t been implemented yet and there’s a good chance it never will. The whole point of getting these drops is to sell them on the Steam marketplace where some of them go for ridiculous amounts of money. As you might imagine, some of these skins are rarer than others, hence the perceived value. It’s basic supply and demand where the common skins only sell for a couple of cents while the extremely rare Shiny Banana, Galaxynana, and Crypticnana will set you back hundreds of dollars.
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As expected, a lot of folks are buying these ridiculously expensive skins just so they can sell them off at an even higher price later, sort of like what most people are doing with NFTs. The only difference is that you don’t necessarily need to invest anything into these skins because you can get them for free every three hours by simply launching the game and clicking on a banana. In theory, the money you make by selling items on the marketplace is virtual currency and can’t be used outside Steam. In practice, though, Steam funds can easily be converted into real cash if you’re willing to jump through a couple of hoops and visit some dubious third-party sites.
Monkey Business
So what about the developer/publisher? Well, that’s where things get interesting. Whenever you sell an item through the marketplace, you only get around 85% of that item’s value in Steam Wallet funds, with the remaining 10% going to the game publisher and 5% to Valve. Naturally, in the case of items for games like Dota 2 or CS: GO it all goes to Value. And, as far as I can tell, game makers walk away with actual money as opposed to Steam Wallet funds as a result of these transactions. This, of course, includes the maker or makers of Banana.
It’s somewhat difficult to track down the brains behind this ingenious operation since the listed publisher and developers all link to the same page. However, if you go to theOG banana Steam groupyou’ll notice that it’s run by four users, namely, AesteticSpartan, Chouky' RainbowShadow, Sky, and Robert Partyson. Some of these usernames also show up in Banana’s Discord server, but others are probably using other aliases. All thse users also have hundreds of banana skins in their inventory, which is quite telling indeed. Based on some of the discussions I’ve seen on Steam, I’d hazard to guess that Robert Partyson is the mastermind behind Banana, but don’t quote me on that.
Presumably, Banana has been generating quite a bit of money without offering anything of value in return, which isn’t particularly uncommon in the games industry these days. But I am a bit surprised that Valve has yet to do anything about this whole situation. Then again, there are plenty of other things on Steam that can’t be considered actual games, so maybe Gabe & co. are happy to look the other way until the fad blows over. Either way, it looks like Banana is here to stay for a while longer.
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