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Never a dull day on Steam, with there now being a game where all you do is just click a picture of a Banana. Yes, that's it and over 30,000 people are playing it right now.

30,687 at time of writing to be exact, according to SteamDB. Although, playing is perhaps not the right word for this. Loading, clicking a Banana once or twice and then leaving it minimized is probably much more accurate. It's an idle clicker game, one that you're not really supposed to do anything.

So what's the point and why are people doing this? Well, you can thank the Steam Marketplace for that. Inspired by another clicker game called Egg, that has the same idea. The developer even said it's just a worse made version of it on the Steam forum:

It's a free to play game, but it does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games. I had it loaded for only a few minutes and got a fancy looking Dogenana which is worth about £0.13 at time of writing and according to Steam 6,863 were actually sold in the last 24 hours. People are going Bananas over it.

Some of these Bananas are worth a lot like the Crypticnana currently at a lowest listed price of £199.18, and only 25 of them actually exist as items.

It has a Native Linux version, although that didn't actually work for me, but it did work on Proton 9. I'm not suggesting you go play it, because it's ridiculous, but thought it was somewhat amusing to highlight and perhaps you might find it as stupid as I do.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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For the record Liam, I do indeed find it as stupid as you do.
Tevur May 30
Wow, I would thank everyone and espacially GoL for being entitled to the chance of beholding the decline of humankind from the first row.
Thank you!
sus101 May 30
LoudTechie May 30
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
Quoteit does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games

So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.

Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
Quoteit does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games

So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.

Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.
But in this case, the people who create the nft-like things are not charging you for them. You get the game for free, you get the item drops for free. Then, yes, apparently you can become a profiteer because some suckers are willing to buy them for some reason. But the actual game-and-image creators are not scamming you, the game user and recipient of item drops.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 30 May 2024 at 6:29 pm UTC
LoudTechie May 30
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
Quoteit does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games

So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.

Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.
But in this case, the people who create the nft-like things are not charging you for them. You get the game for free, you get the item drops for free. Then, yes, apparently you can become a profiteer because some suckers are willing to buy them for some reason. But the actual game creators are not scamming you, the game user and recipient of item drops.

Convincing point.
I was thinking about how it could be treated and writing this for nfts isn't much harder, but in practice(which is the only thing that matters) this non-scammy exists for Steam items, but not on significant scale for nfts
Salvatos May 30
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
Quoteit does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games

So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.

Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.
But in this case, the people who create the nft-like things are not charging you for them. You get the game for free, you get the item drops for free. Then, yes, apparently you can become a profiteer because some suckers are willing to buy them for some reason. But the actual game-and-image creators are not scamming you, the game user and recipient of item drops.
You can buy some of them directly from the developer, actually, e.g. https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/2923300/detail/57/
Oddly enough, people are buying and selling this particular one at higher prices on the Marketplace, so it seems about as sensible as NFTs to me.
Nic264 May 30
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.
There are many free NFT-dropping games. This scheme is what they call “Play-to-Earn”: play, regularly drop NFTs or crypto-coins (or in this case Steam items) then try to sell them to someone who sees some value in them.

Here is a list of free Pay-to-Earn NFT-based idle games: https://playtoearn.com/blockchaingames/All-Blockchain/Idle/All-Status/All-Device/NFT/All-PlayToEarn/Free-To-Play.

The game creator doesn't have to make you pay or even to scam you to make money: they can for instance drop themselves a high-value token and try to sell it like everyone else. When people value something because it is rare and you control the rarity, ultimately you control the value.
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
Quoteit does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games

So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.

Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.
But in this case, the people who create the nft-like things are not charging you for them. You get the game for free, you get the item drops for free. Then, yes, apparently you can become a profiteer because some suckers are willing to buy them for some reason. But the actual game-and-image creators are not scamming you, the game user and recipient of item drops.
You can buy some of them directly from the developer, actually, e.g. https://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/2923300/detail/57/
Oddly enough, people are buying and selling this particular one at higher prices on the Marketplace, so it seems about as sensible as NFTs to me.
Just to be clear, I never said it was more sensible than NFTs. I just said it was not scamming specifically the people who acquire and "play" it.
Why?
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