WITH an all-time peak of 847,040 players, Banana is currently the third most popular game on Steam.
This isn’t incredible because it’s from a small unknown developer, or because it had no marketing, but because it’s a game with no gameplay.
Banana is free to play and features a banana in the middle on a yellow screen.
Every time you click the number above the banana goes up, and that’s it. That’s the game.
Except there is something else. Every three hours a ‘Banana Skin’ will drop into your Steam account’s inventory.
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These items can be bought from and sold to other Steam members for real money via the Steam Community Market.
The majority of these bananas are worth just $0.03 on the marketplace, but occasionally players will pull a rare banana worth a lot more.
Currently the most expensive Banana Skins are just $0.19, but people have reported them selling for a lot more.
The highest price someone has paid for a Banana Skin appears to be $1,345 (£1k), obviously hoping that they can later sell it for more.
While this is a particularly expensive skin, there are other Banana Skins that have sold for hundreds of dollars.
People are calling it a new type of NFT, as the Banana Skins have no real use or value other than what people are willing to pay for them.
The prices change depending on the day and how much people are willing to spend on them.
Speaking to Polygon via Discord, the developer revealed that Banana has a significant issue with bots.
Developer Hery says: “Unfortunately we are currently facing some problems around botting.
“Since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alternative accounts in order to get rarer drops or at least drops in bulk.”
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The developer is currently working with Valve to stop the bot accounts, but everything about this game still seems a bit … well bananas.
If you want to read more about Steam, find out about the Valve lawsuit over Steam’s alleged monopoly on PC games.