Last week, I decided to check out the Steam game Banana, because I got nothing else going on. Suffice it to say, I did not see what all the fuss was about. This is clearly some sort of joke/meme I’m not part of, but that hasn’t stopped the Cookie Clicker-esque game from taking the PC platform by storm.
As of right now (literally, as I type these words out), Banana is the second-most played game on Steam. It’s behind the likes of Counter-Strike 2 because good luck knocking that thing off its top spot, but it does put it ahead of other free-to-play games like Dota 2 and Apex Legends.
Also, it just keeps beating its concurrent player record. Within the last few hours, SteamDB has recorded a pretty hefty 847,040 people playing in one go. You can see the graph just keeps going up and up like there’s no stopping it.
Is it even good?
It’s weird that it’s become so popular these past few months. It’s hard to explain exactly what’s going on here, but there’s definitely something about Banana that’s pulling people in. At the time of writing, the game is showing as “Mostly Positive” on Steam.
Is it a good game? Absolutely not. You can @ me as much as you want, it’s not really fun to click on a digital banana to see how high the numbers go up. But that isn’t the point of it, it seems.
If you look at the surrounding community, you’ll see there’s something bigger than the gameplay itself. The fact that it affords people the opportunity to earn (and buy) banana skins and sell them is almost certainly the crux of the experience. All I know is, it’s making the developer/s pretty wealthy from just one banana.
