We have seen many small and medium-sized PC games become hugely popular on Valve"s Steam service over the last few months, from Palworld, to Helldivers 2 and more. However, one game is threatening to become one of the most played games on Steam ever, and it"s barely a game.
It"s called Banana, and it"s a free-to-play title from a publisher called Sky. Your objective is to click on the banana you see on screen as much as you can. You might get a random banana every few hours that you can add to your banana collection, or, if you get a rare banana, you can try to trade it or sell it on the Steam market, much like how you can do the same with a rare Counter-Strike 2 weapon skin.
That last bit might be the reason why Banana has suddenly become massively popular on Steam. The game launched in late April, but according to the stats shown on SteamDB, the game started its surge of new players in mid-May. By early June, Banana had over 46,000 concurrent players clicking on that virtual piece of fruit at once.
That would be huge for any Steam game, let alone a free-to-play clicker game. However, the popularity didn"t stop. The concurrent player count for Banana kept going up. On Monday, it reached its (so far) all-time concurrent player count of 858,915 on Steam,
Right now, the game still has well over 800,000 players at once, which makes it the second most popular game on Steam at the moment, behind only Valve"s Counter-Strike 2. While there are a few paid special bananas you can purchase on its Steam page at the moment, it remains to be seen if the publisher of Banana can turn all those players online who play for free into ones who will actually purchase content.