A mega hit hits Steam with incredible player numbers. But many gaming experts warn: This could be a huge scam that is just looking for victims.
From time to time, quite bizarre games suddenly become very popular. This is currently the case with a game on Steam that revolves around a banana: Banana. We have already talked about the game on MeinMMO. However, even though the game has nearly a million “players” simultaneously, many are warning against it – because it could be a really nasty scheme that some major gaming YouTubers are vocally warning about.
Instead of clever features, there are drops in the Steam account
What kind of game is this? To call “Banana” a real game is probably already bold. Because the game literally consists of the image of a banana that you can click on. When you do that, a number rises above the banana.
Basically, “Banana” is a clicker game like “Cookie Clicker”, just without the features that actually make the genre interesting and somewhat varied.
The “catch” of the matter is: Every 3 hours, players receive a banana as a “drop”, which then lands in the inventory of their Steam account.
Some feel reminded of NFTs with Banana – Ubisoft also wanted to use that in games:
Speculative object: Banana
What is the deal with the drop bananas? Exactly that is the thing: Nothing. The bananas in the Steam inventory are currently nothing more than an image. They cannot be used in the game or displayed at all.
Although the developer says that at some point, the special bananas should be usable as a “skin” for the clickable banana – but so far this is not possible.
But there is one thing you can do with the bananas: Sell them.
These drop bananas can be traded on the Steam Marketplace. There you can sell them to other players. Most bananas have a price of 3 to 4 cents – so absolutely negligible. The most expensive bananas, particularly rare ones, have a “value” of around 1,000 euros.
This is nothing more than pure speculation. People buy images of rare bananas in the hope that they can resell these images for an even higher price.
With every transaction, the developer also earns.
This method reminds one of the NFT hype that existed a few years ago – in which almost all buyers ended up losing their money after it became clear that the NFTs simply had no value and the expected hype did not materialize.
Why are so many playing Banana? If you check Steam Charts, “Banana” is currently one of the most popular games. There are over 830,000 players simultaneously (as of: 17.06.2024, 10:00 via SteamCharts).
However, as the critical YouTuber Charles White suspects, this is misleading: Because a large part of these players are bots. Banana hardly consumes any resources from the PC, so many create dozens or even hundreds of bots to farm the banana images – in the hope of getting a really “good” one that they can then sell.
It is questionable how many of the players are real people sitting in front of Steam and clicking on the banana. Since you can’t do anything in the game other than repeatedly clicking on a banana. In an interview with Polygon, the developer already confirmed that only a third of the players are real.
Developer spreads extreme right-wing views on Steam
Why is the developer being criticized? By some, such as the YouTuber Cr1TiKaL, the game is described as “really bad scam”. The British YouTuber The Spiffing Brit also criticizes the German developer behind Banana for several reasons:
On the one hand, the developer has set his inventory to private for several days. The suspicion that Britain expresses: It is possible that the developer has put the “rarest” bananas into his inventory and is now selling them through himself and close friends, to cash in double. However, this cannot be proven.
By the way, Brit also found out that the developer was previously known on Steam under other usernames such as “Fette Frauen haltet abstand” or “Abschieben schafft Wohnraum” – and his profile shows images of Trump and Putin.
Another point is the only other game that has been released by the developers: “Lass ich sliden”.
This game consists of a simple landscape built from pre-made assets where you essentially get achievements for every action – even for pressing a single key, there are 4 of them. These games exist only so that people can quickly have many achievements to raise their level on Steam and gain account XP.
The final accusation is: Banana is a “scam” in which some susceptible people are led by FOMO to buy completely worthless images of bananas.
Whether or not one wants to support such things must be decided by each individual – or simply play really good strategy games and not bother with bananas.
