With ‘Banana’ topping 400,000 concurrent players, will Steam step in?

If you’ve been paying attention to the most played games on Steam lately, you’ve no doubt seen a strange game. This will be the “Banana” game in which you…click a banana. And that’s it. That’s all it is.

But now Banana has surpassed 420,000 concurrent players As of an hour ago And things are escalating a little, given… a reason Players are playing, and who is actually playing it. It’s a zillion robots.

The game is a money printer. After clicking enough, you’ll earn banana “wraps” in the game, and due to the ability to sell those counters, you can make actual money just from those clicks. While most hides may sell for three cents, some prices have risen to tens or even hundreds of dollars. The record now appears to be $1,345.

The problem is that the vast majority of those playing are bots, members of the development team Heri admitted to Polygon:

“Unfortunately, we are currently experiencing some issues with bots, since the game is basically consuming 1% or no resources on your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alt accounts in order to get rare drops or at least drops In large quantities.”

At last count, only a third of the players were “real” and the rest were bots. That was when the game had 141,000 players, and now that percentage may have increased. Hery says they’ve reached out to Valve for help stopping it, but I wonder if Valve can do more than that.

Herry admits that the game is set up as an “infinite money legal glitch.” Players play the base game on Earth for free, finding skins to sell for money. I mean it’s a market. People pay for these skins for one reason or another, even the expensive ones. But I wonder if Valve might step in to put some new rules around games like this, lest the service suddenly become inundated with them. This game is printing money for Valve, the players, and the developer, and I mean you probably don’t need more than one person or a skeleton team to create/run a game like this, but this… can’t continue, right? Will the bot-grown banana game be at the top of Steam at all times?

So far, there seems to be no end to bots and none of Valve’s end, although most of the time they are silent as we well know. I don’t really think this can go on forever, but if not, I wonder how it will end and what the justification is.

Follow me On Twitter, Threads, Youtube, And Instagram.

Pick up my science fiction novels Hero Killer series And Earth trilogy.