Hundreds of thousands of people are now clicking a Banana on Steam

As a ridiculous update to an article I did recently about the free game called Banana, where it seemed insane that over 30,000 people were clicking it - now a whole lot more people are doing so too.

To refresh your little minds a moment. On Steam, there's a game called Banana. It's an idle clicker game, where all you do is load it up and click a picture of a Banana. You can leave it in the background, and let it do its thing. Over time, you gradually get Steam Items in the form of random Bananas.

It looks like this and that's literally it:

The number of players has only continued to climb on it too. About 7 hours ago (SteamDB) it hit a peak player count of 252,171. Although, according to what the developer told Polygon, they've had a bit of a bot problem they're trying to solve. The developer has given the game updates, like forcing you to actually click now and then, to help reduce some botting so the actual number of people is probably a reasonably good deal lower.

In a recent post, the developer also announced over 650,000 people have now downloaded it.

Why? Those Steam Items. Those gloriously tasty bananas. People are going, well — ape over them. Bananas go into your Steam inventory and so you can sell them. And clearly, people are actually buying them too, just look at my Retronana that's had nearly 10,000 sold in the last 24 hours. Not for much though for these but some of them are very limited and so people are trying their luck.

The game has a Linux version, although it doesn't work for me, but Proton 9 does. Not that I suggest you "play" it, I just find it amusingly absurd that this continues to be a thing. It's not a surprise though, this is the kind of thing Valve invites with the Steam market.

It's low-stakes trading that takes no effort at all from everyone, somewhat reminiscent of the stupid NFT bubble (glad that's over) or actual trading cards but not as fun. People just like to collect things and be a part of something in some ways, while of course there's going to be a large percentage that are hoping to nab one of the rare items that they might be able to sucker someone into buying to then spend their Banana money on Steam directly for a new game.

Banana is available on Steam.