Summary
The Unity-based clicker game simply calledBananahas been accused of being nothing more than a scam, which the developers have firmly denied. Theindie gameis incredibly simplistic. Upon installing it, players are presented with a screen with a single banana in the center, and the gameplay consists solely of clicking on the fruit over and over. The Steam description elaborates that “every 3 and 18 hours, you get dropped a banana.”
In other words, after clicking for a while, a banana with a special skin will drop. These skins (some of which feature art used without permission or a license) are of varying rarity but currently have no actual use in-game. The only thing players can do with these skins, besides perhaps just hang onto them, is sell them on the Steam marketplace. It’s an odd game, no doubt. Yet, despite that,Bananahas seen incredible growth on Steamin recent weeks. With over 800,000 players at the time of writing, it currently ranks as the second-most played game on the platform, according to SteamDB, beaten only byCounter-Strike 2.
As theindie game’s popularity has risen, so too have the eyes scrutinizing its success, and many people claim that it is simply a money-milking scam. While most of the banana skins that people obtain only sell for a few pennies on the Steam marketplace, the more rare are being sold for hundreds of dollars. One skin, the Crypticnana, currently has a starting price of $1,700 because there are intentionally only 25 in existence. Despite this seemingly inexplicable success and the resulting criticism, one of the developers, AestheticSpartan, denies thatBananais a scam in any way.
The Banana Game Is Extremely Successful, Scam or Not
AestheticSpartan admits to a lot of bots playingBananaand inflating the numbers, but there are also real people buying these banana skins, and Steam and the developers are taking a cut.IGNestimated that tens of thousands of dollars are earned each day thanks to this seemingly innocuous,weird little indie game. However, another member of the development team, Hery, toldPolygonthatBananais thriving simply because it’s a “legal infinite money glitch. Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items.”
It’s worth noting that one ofBanana’s former developers, aaladin66, previously made a game calledLass Ich Sliden,which was also accused of being a scam. LikeBanana, it attempted to sell random virtual items to make easy money, though itdidn’t perform very well. The business model seems to have been revamped and reskinned, so to speak, withBanana.Aaladin66has been removed from the list ofBananadevelopers.
IfBananawere a scam, one might expect at least some people to feel, well, scammed and say as much in the Steam reviews. However, the gameis sitting at a comfortable “Very Positive” rating on the platform, with over 23,000 reviews. How exactly it’s doing so well or why it’s so appealing is unclear. It might just be another puzzling yet temporary gaming fad, like2016’sMy Name is Mayothat had players endlessly tapping on a mayonnaise jar.
