One of the developers behind the game (?) has been removed from the project because he had a somewhat suspicious “bitcoin” project in the past.

We’ve already written about Banana, which is currently a clicker game, nothing more: it provides bananas of varying rarity, which can then be sold on the Steam marketplace. However, one of its developers, Theselions, may have been involved in a marketplace scam a few years ago that involved Steam items. A joke bitcoin item from a game called Run! was artificially inflated on the Valve platform. This was discovered and the leader of the scam was banned, the game disappeared, and the item in question was banned from the marketplace.

On Discord, one of the developers, Spartan, wrote: “Theselions was once involved in a Steam Market “Bitcoin” scam/bug. We were unaware of this until recent videos started pointing this out, and we almost immediately had a conversation with the entire team about the situation. We gave him a chance to explain the situation and we know that he is remorseful and sorry for what happened in the past. We still parted ways with him on good terms because we all realized that the negative impact of something in his past should not paint him as a cheater or any of the other names people have been calling him. Please stop harassing Theselions about this as he is aware of the situation. His inventory has been cleared of any valuable bananas that could be of concern to the community.

The game is completely owned by Sky and myself. And this is what we want to tell the community: Lions’ inventory has been cleared, feel free to check for yourself. He’s no longer a member/part of the team. There is no cheating/scamming going on. We have listened to the community, things mentioned to our mods via DMs or tickets HAVE been written up and we are looking into it all. We are working on updates and cannot wait to make this game bigger and better than just a clicker game. Please stay tuned as we have been and are still working on a large amount of updates to improve the game and let you all do much more with your bananas. Lions has not been kicked off the server as we do not believe he has done anything to deserve a ban,” Spartan wrote.

Hery, one of Banana’s developers, told Polygon that they feel the pressure not only because of the suspected fraud background, but also because their product uses about 1% of our PC’s resources, and people use up to a thousand accounts to either get the bananas for sale in bulk, or to eat from the rarer, more valuable versions. A lot of people have too much free time on their hands…

Source: PCGamer, Polygon