Banana: the New #1 Game on Steam
Banana is a surprise newcomer topping the Steam charts! At the moment, Banana is sitting at #1 with 750k concurrent users, above PUBG, Dota, and Counter-Strike. However, Banana could hardly be described as a game, and those active player stats are boosted (more on this later). Banana is primarily about acquiring and trading rare collectibles that have zero functionality.
Sound familiar? In some ways, Banana is the absurd yet logical extrapolation of NFT games, extrapolated to the point where there’s no blockchain involved. Let’s follow the web3 playbook and see how Banana beats them at their own game.
Step 1 – Meme
Banana.exe shows a picture of a banana with a number above it. When you click on the banana, the number goes up by 1.
…
That’s it.
No sound. No animation. No progression systems. No spending bananas to buy an auto-clicker. The game doesn’t even save your progress – If you close and reopen it, the counter resets to 0.
The experience is downright baffling. Like any good meme, it compels you to tell a friend about the strangeness of it all. It helps that bananas look like penises and are a favorite food of apes. This memeability allows Banana to go viral, but it is critical to leverage that mass exposure in the next step.
Step 2 – Boost your Stats
Banana pays its users to boost its stats. If you leave the game open and click every couple hours, you will periodically receive collectible bananas. The vast majority of these bananas are worthless, but a few ultra-rare ones sell for $100+ on Steam Marketplace. The effective payout rate is roughly 1¢ per hour, but dreams of a jackpot encourage users to keep the game running in the background.
These idlers have boosted Banana’s concurrent users (ccu) to 750k as of this writing. Thanks to this idling, Banana’s ccu are more like daily active users. When examining hourly ccu stats, Banana does not have the daily peaks and troughs of normal games. By topping the Steam charts with this favorable comparison, Banana draws additional attention and presents a deceptively large playerbase. I personally stumbled upon Banana while checking Steam’s top games, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
This idling also serves to reinforce engagement. Like a daily quest, the obligatory click every few hours keeps Banana in the user’s mind. Additionally, your participation in Banana is broadcast to your gamer friends via Steam and Discord. With Banana on the mind, users will occasionally check their drops and their marketplace value, which brings us to the money-making side of the operation.
Step 3 – Speculate on Scarcity
Collectible bananas are traded on the Steam marketplace with a trading volume of roughly $100k in the last 24 hours. Banana’s developers take a 10% cut, netting about $10k revenue from transaction fees. For additional revenue, the game developers sell directly into the market (allegedly). Note that this is by no means a steady or sustainable stream. The game’s ccu have quadrupled in the last week, and speculative interest may crash within a few more weeks. The developers are cashing out while they can.
There are a variety of “rare” and “limited-time” bananas, and the highest sale price to date is $1400. Most bananas are garbage that sell for the minimum price – 3 cents in your local currency. That local currency point is important, as roughly ⅓ of Banana collectors are Russian.
All these bananas are laughably useless. They have absolutely no function. You can’t even change your in-game banana to look like the collectibles you own. The community embraces this – one of the most valuable bananas is named “test” with no image and the accompanying description:
bugged item congrats to who ever owns it
For $78, this can be yours!
Moreover, there are no guarantees of scarcity. The drop probabilities are not public, nor is the total circulating supply. In fact, even the seller names are obfuscated, so it is impossible to know if Banana’s developers are directly selling rare bananas. However, the lack of functionality or transparency has not stopped speculative bubbles before.
The story of the banana market is an all too familiar one of memes and scarcity. The game started as a small group of friends sharing funny banana memes, like pepenana and MLGbanana. With built-in scarcity, the most based bananas would naturally rise in price. Accompanied with the viral growth of the game, speculators hop on the bandwagon hoping the line will continue to go up.
Crypto Comparisons
Banana is like an exaggerated funhouse mirror of crypto. Profile pic NFTs are criticized for their lack of functionality, yet at least they try with private discords and DAO votes – Banana is upfront with its uselessness. Web3 games are criticized for their lackluster gameplay – Banana knows it’s a waste of dev effort. Blockchain has difficulty onboarding new users – Banana solves the problem by removing the blockchain.
In other sense, Banana is all the worst parts of crypto that the purists would like to excise. Banana is about vapid memes, not revolutionary technology. Banana is about making a quick buck, not the long-term vision. Banana is full of insider activity and obfuscation, no transparent and trustless smart contracts here.
Personally, I was attracted to the web3 vision of decentralized coordination, but I was turned off by the over-financialization and short-sighted speculation. For crypto’s sake, I hope the get-rich-quick schemes move off the blockchain into spaces like Banana so the technology can develop in peace.
Viral Copycats
Memetic virality is chaotic and extremely difficult to reproduce, and the same is true of Banana. Notably, Egg is practically identical to Banana and released months earlier without the same viral growth. As with any successful get-rich-quick scheme, the copycats are flooding in – Banana & Cucumber stays true to the original formula, while Cats adds some more production quality.
As with most memecoins, Banana will have its month in the sun before fading back into obscurity. These copycats are likely to follow a parallel yet depressed trajectory, as the memetic qualities fade. Some jokes are only funny the first time.
