Remember the banana clicker game people flocked to last year, since it promised quick bucks via in-game item drops? Well, 14 months later, it continues to attract hundreds of thousands of people on Steam, despite the fact that most of the game’s items are completely worthless now.
Every day, I load up and check out SteamDB for new and trending games, as I always love to keep my ear to the ground. Hell, sometimes I’ll even see something interesting for me and my friends to fire up, so it’s become quite the habit. However, just about every time I open the thing up, I notice one game near Steam’s top, Banana, the 2024 clicker game where one could earn in-game drops by playing and subsequently sell them for a quick buck.
It was a new form of NFT, only these items weren’t NFTs at all but rather price-inflated digital goodies one could trade on Steam’s marketplace, much like you’d do with Dota or CS skins.
Back when it first launched, it managed to attract over 900,000 concurrent players and remains to this day as one of the most-played games in Steam history, sitting comfortably within the top 10.
These days, it attracts hundreds of thousands of players and has done so consistently for over a year. At the moment, it usually peaks somewhere around 100,000 concurrent players, surpassing some of gaming’s most popular titles, such as Dead by Daylight or Marvel Rivals, with people obviously still believing you could get money out of clicking on a banana.
However, as Steam’s own marketplace shows, most of the “expensive” bananas merely have a few listings available, meaning it’s just a handful of players setting super high prices no one is going to pay. The most expensive item currently listed is the Cybernana, costing over a thousand Steam bucks, despite the fact that only three were sold in 2025, both at under 200.
And these “sales,” indicative of a potentially still kicking, strong cash-making market, are very likely trades where random items are purchased at arbitrary prices as part of some other Steam transaction between players.
Now I get it, most of these “hundreds of thousands of players” could very well be bots. And, given that the internet is dead, and no real people use it anymore, that’s probably true. But, no matter what, it’s a ludicrous number of folk, using bots or not, trying to get rich quick via last year’s fad, taking up a spot on Steam’s charts and overshadowing actually good games.
