Strange Free-to-Play Game is Blowing Up on Steam

The free-to-play game Banana is riding a wave of popularity, having recently crossed 700,000 players on Steam. Throughout the week, the indie game’s Steam player count has risen exponentially, and it now ranks among the most played games on the storefront.

Having been released on April 23, Banana is a fairly new addition to Steam’s vast library of PC games. However, its player count truly took off at the start of June, going from nearly 37,000 on June 1 to over 700,000 by June 15. The game’s objective is to simply click on the banana and increase the counter, with special banana skins dropping at set intervals. Despite achieving popularity comparable to other indie hits like Palworld from earlier this year, Banana‘s appeal is understandably centered on word-of-mouth hype and thus the clicker game stands out as an anomaly.

According to SteamDB, Banana hit an all-time peak player count of 702,184 players on June 15. In doing so, it became the 12th most played title on Steam in terms of all-time peak player count, behind major online games, such as PUBG: Battlegrounds, Palworld, Counter-Strike 2, and more. At the time of writing, the offbeat game is the second most-played game on the storefront, only behind the Counter-Strike sequel which has more than 784,000 active players right now. This viral phenomenon marks another success story for a weird indie game after the likes of Goat Simulator took off in similar fashion in the past.

There May Be a Catch Behind Banana’s Steam Player Count

Earlier this week, Polygon reported that one of Banana‘s developers confirmed the game was facing a bot issue. Among the game’s 141,000 concurrent players back then, only one-third (47,000) were declared to be real players. While the developer mentioned that they were working with Valve to remove bots from the game, there is a chance that the absurdly high player count may constitute a significant population of bots. Apparently, some people are using bots to try and get rare banana skins to sell them in the Steam Marketplace.

Interestingly, Banana isn’t the only strange game available on Steam. Earlier in February, Egg, which is understood to be an inspiration for Banana, went live on the storefront. Besides these clicker games with straightforward objectives, there are several other outlandish games, such as the Goat Simulator series, which have built a fan following. Another strange game titled Squirrel With a Gun is set to arrive soon.

Steam

Steam is a digital video game storefront and program developed by Valve that allows gamers to purchase, play, and mod their titles all through one convenient program.

Brand

Valve

Original Release Date

September 12, 2003