Last week, I decided tocheck outthe Steam gameBanana, because I got nothing else going on. Suffice it to say, I did not see what all the fuss was about. This is clearly some sort of joke/meme I’m not part of, but that hasn’t stopped theCookie Clicker-esque game from taking the PC platform by storm.

As of right now (literally, as I type these words out),Bananais the second-most played game on Steam. It’s behind the likes ofCounter-Strike 2because good luck knocking that thing off its top spot, but it does put it ahead of other free-to-play games likeDota 2andApex Legends.

An image of a banana in the middle of the screen.

Also, it just keeps beating its concurrent player record. Within the last few hours,SteamDBhas recorded a pretty hefty 847,040 people playing in one go. You can see the graph just keeps going up and up like there’s no stopping it.

Is it even good?

It’s weird that it’s become so popular these past few months. It’s hard to explain exactly what’s going on here, but there’s definitely something aboutBananathat’s pulling people in. At the time of writing, the game is showing as “Mostly Positive” onSteam.

Is it a good game? Absolutely not. You can @ me as much as you want, it’s not really fun to click on a digital banana to see how high the numbers go up. But that isn’t the point of it, it seems.

A banana with the number 40 above it for some reason.

If you look at the surrounding community, you’ll see there’s something bigger than the gameplay itself. The fact that it affords people the opportunity to earn (and buy) banana skins and sell them is almost certainly the crux of the experience. All I know is, it’s making the developer/s pretty wealthy from just one banana.

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