Larian Studios’ game is clearly one you can sink dozens of hours into (and there’s no shame in admitting it), but now we have a product that is in a very strange position by comparison.

This game (?) currently ranks second in terms of daily concurrent players on Steam. Ahead of it is a “home-grown” game, Counter-Strike 2 from Gabe Newell’s company. But what is it we are talking about? The name is Banana. What do you do? You click on a banana. It’s not fiction. More and more people are doing it, and it’s already 859,000 players at the same time, an increase of 100,000 in one week.

However, this is already a threat to Baldur’s Gate 3, which has deservedly been one of Steam’s most played titles for some time. It has a record of 875,343 concurrent players, a number that is not far off from Banana’s achievement. The situation is skewed by the fact that Banana is free to play, while Baldur’s Gate 3 is a paid title. But why in the world is Banana so popular?

Well, it’s not because of the peripheral manufacturers behind it (after all, repeated, constant clicking wears out the mouse over time, no matter who made it and for what audience), but the secret is that if you click on a banana enough, another one will pop up on the Steam Marketplace for trading, and there are expensive, rare versions among them. The question is whether it’s worth clicking on a banana so many times.

And that’s the trick: Banana has disrupted Steam so much that lines of code with essentially no gameplay could become more popular on Valve’s platform than the best game of 2023. But most saleable bananas are worth 3 cents on the market. One for the player, one for Valve, and one for the developer. You could say: someone gets rich with minimal effort…

Source: PCGamer, Steam