The clicker game called Banana is gaining increasing popularity on Steam, currently ranking 9th among games with the highest peak online of all time (917,272 players), surpassing Hogwart’s Legacy (879,308 players) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (875,343 players). The daily online player count for the game fluctuates around over 400,000 players.

The situation is somewhat phenomenal: Banana doesn't boast any stunning visuals or complex and engaging mechanics. All the player needs to do is click on a banana image, earning points and trying to obtain quirky bananas of varying value in their Steam inventory, which can be sold for real money on the platform’s marketplace. Bananas have become a kind of analog to "Bitcoin" or "NFT". The most expensive "Special Golden Banana" from the game was sold for $1,378.58.

This has led players to believe that this game is nothing more than a scam. However, the developers deny these claims and promise that the game will evolve into something more than just a clicker game.

So, the question arises, how did this game manage to achieve such online popularity and surpass many beloved AAA projects? Several key factors are at play here.

• Price: The game is completely free, making it accessible to any Steam user.

• Technical Simplicity: Banana has a very simple visual style, making it a game that can run on any computer. This allows it to be installed on any computer.

• Gambling Appeal: "Clickers that can make you money" is not a new concept. Often, these are common scam schemes, but despite this, people continue to chase easy money, hoping to get a valuable item (in this case, a banana) that can be exchanged for a large sum. This increases demand for such games.

• Passivity: Players don’t necessarily need to take action to receive rare types of bananas. After a certain period, the game automatically rewards the player. Additionally, some users may use so-called autoclickers, which do all the work for the player, even in the background.

• Multiplier: This point can be called a symbiosis of the previous ones. The desire to increase their chances of getting rich forces people to create dozens of alternative accounts, on which they also run the game in multiple windows (thanks to separate software). Also, the presence of bots, which occupy a part of this large online community, should not be excluded.

Thus, we can assume that the "popularity" phenomenon of the Banana game might be an artificial and temporary occurrence. Its online presence may decline just as quickly as it rose, especially if users are indeed engaging in manipulations that Valve may not like. Or if the game truly turns out to be nothing more than a scam.