Author: Game Infliction

Banana is not the first game of its kind; the virtually identical game Egg was released earlier this year in February, and new contender Cats showed up after Banana’s release back in April. All of these games follow the same format of mindlessly clicking on an image for no discernible reason other than to raise the click counter and to be gifted a Steam item on timed intervals. In Banana’s case, players are rewarded for their clicks with various digital bananas every three hours, many of which are common, but some of which are quite rare. Players can also outright purchase bananas from the game’s store, but the bananas available are rotated out at the developers’ discretion.

And therein lies the real purpose of Banana: to artificially generate an economy for useless digital “goods.” Now, to be clear, Banana is not technically a scam. The game is free-to-play and it doesn’t push you to monetize it if you don’t want to. You can download it, spend a few minutes satisfying your fruit-clicking urges, and then uninstall it without spending a cent. Unlike many free-to-play games that find ways to restrict or annoy players enough so they spend cash to alleviate the friction, Banana doesn’t really have any gameplay to restrict. You click and the number goes up. The number isn’t even saved across play sessions, meaning it resets every time you turn off the game. The digital bananas you receive are dropped right into your Steam account, and seemingly serve no purpose beyond the pure euphoria of possessing them and the opportunity to sell bananas to other players.

We’ve already covered how the economics of Banana work in regards to the percentages the devs and Valve take from each banana transaction, which is now up in the tens of thousands per day. Although the developers have been adamant that Banana is not a scam, and even went through the trouble of ejecting developer Theselions (their Steam name) because of their previous association with a Bitcoin scam, they don’t seem to have the highest view of their own product. In an interview with Polygon, developer Hery referred to Banana as a “stupid game,” and that the reason it’s become popular is because it’s a “legal infinite money glitch. Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items.”

It’s a telling admission, but it does nothing to mitigate the underlying issue with exactly this type of “game.” Banana and other games like it skirt by on technicalities and appeals to the absurdity of their premise while still raking in plenty of money for their creators, and Valve does nothing to deal with such shovelware on its platform because it too stands to make a tidy profit from the endeavor. That Hery also admitted during the Polygon interview that a significant chunk of Banana’s player base is made up of bots doesn’t help either. Even though Hery claims the team has contacted Valve for help addressing the bot issue, they have still inflated the game’s player count to give it more visibility on Steam in the short term, enticing even more curious players to give it a try and perhaps be part of a transaction or two.

That attention has caused many to ask just what exactly is going on here, including us at IGN. YouTuber Jauwn did a deep dive into Banana, including a look at the game’s code. Luckily, there’s no indication that it’s malware, using your computer to mine cryptocurrency, or any other obviously deceptive scheme. Banana is exactly what it looks like: a clicking simulator designed to waste your time and maybe convince you to try selling the fruits of your labor on the store for some cash. But why is it so popular? Once you subtract the bots, are there really that many players who are feeling enough banana-fever to maintain an entire economy around virtual fruits?

As with other recent digital get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs or niche cryptocurrencies, Banana is trying to tap into a meme market. It’s a speculator bubble fueled by misguided hopefuls who think the bananas might be worth something someday, irony-poisoned edgelords who know it won’t but like being in on the joke, and bots that flood the market to make the whole enterprise seem more popular than it actually is. Sure, buying and selling bananas is less harmful than blockchain-based transactions because it isn’t burning down the planet to generate these digital tokens, but anyone looking to add bananas to their investment portfolio should reconsider.

The devs have absolute control over how the bananas are distributed, and there’s no way to regulate the digital economy they’ve cultivated. The more players that dive into Banana, the less likely it is that you’ll manage to snatch one of the coveted rare bananas that have sold for a decent sum. What’s far more likely than us all becoming part of a banana republic is that the game’s 15 minutes of fame will soon wind down and anyone who’s spent real money collecting rare bananas in the hopes of flipping them will be left holding the bag. So heed my warning: do not give in to the call of Banana. Don’t reward low effort nonsense like this with your valuable time, because when you start clicking the banana, the only game really being played is on you.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.

“I said, ‘I’m convinced in 18 months you could have a really good game shipped.’ And he said, ‘huh, could it be done any faster?’ And I was like, ‘oh, shoot, I’ve said too long.’ I said, ‘well, even if you did a death march crunch I don’t think you could do it faster than 12, and then you’d be shipping something that was unbalanced and buggy, and the team would be destroyed. So I don’t recommend that.’

“And he said, ‘ok, thanks.’ As we walked out he basically explained any answer over six months was going to result in him having to cancel it, meaning the answer I just gave got the game canceled. But he was going to cancel it anyway. He thought it couldn’t be done in six months, and I just confirmed that to him.”

According to Cain, the cancelation of Van Buren was, ultimately, about money. Interplay’s dire financial situation meant it simply did not have enough cash to fund more than six months of further development, so Van Buren was canceled.

Interplay went on to close down Black Isle Studios and cut its entire staff. The company released Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel in 2004 for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, but it was not enough. That same year, Interplay announced a licensing deal with The Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda for future Fallout games, and in 2007, Interplay sold the Fallout IP to Bethesda outright, and the rest is history.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.