After reaching its peak in June 2024, Banana on Steam has experienced a notable decrease in concurrent players. This article delves into the game's popularity and the factors contributing to its player decline.
Banana Game Steam Charts Show Massive Decline
It’s a Clicker Game About Bananas…
Banana on Steam, launched on April 23, 2024, quickly became a sensation. This free-to-play clicker game, despite its simplistic nature, soared to an all-time peak of 917,272 players in June 2024. However, the game has struggled to regain those heights, with a significant drop in player numbers from November 2024 to the present, according to SteamDB.
For those new to the game, Banana challenges traditional gaming norms with its minimalistic approach. Players click on a banana image repeatedly, but the real attraction lies in the potential for financial gain. Players can earn virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market, where rare items like the "Special Golden Banana" have sold for as much as $1,378.58.
The game's meteoric rise was fueled by the promise of earning Steam Wallet funds with minimal effort. Hery, the game's developer, even referred to it as a "legal 'Infinite money glitch'" in a June 2024 interview with Polygon. However, this surge in popularity attracted automated bots designed to farm valuable drops, artificially inflating the player count.
"Unfortunately, we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC," Hery explained to Polygon. "People are abusing up to 1,000 alternative accounts to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk."
To combat this, the developers introduced bot prevention measures in May 2024. While it's unclear if the current 100,000+ players are genuine, the game's concurrent player count saw a sharp decline post-peak. By July 2024, the average number of players dropped to 549,091, and this downward trend persisted, with November 2024 seeing a significant fall from 400,000 to just over 100,000. Despite a brief doubling of player numbers at the start of 2025, the game has yet to recover.
Currently, Banana holds steady with 112,966 concurrent players and ranks 7th on Steam's Most Played Games list. However, a sudden drop to around 50,000 players was observed on March 16th, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The cause of this dip remains unclear, and it's challenging to determine the role of bots. The overall trend of declining player counts suggests that the game's initial novelty is waning.
The developers have been proactive, regularly updating the game with trading cards, event drops, and quality-of-life enhancements. They've also engaged the community by allowing user-generated banana art through the Steam Workshop, with creators earning a percentage of sales. Despite these efforts, it seems unlikely that the game will return to its peak without the influence of bots.
