What does it mean that hundreds of thousands of players are clicking on a banana?

One of the biggest video games in the world right now is called “Banana.” It consists of a clickable picture of a banana, a count of how many times you click it, and a bunch of in-game rewards, like skins for the banana you can sell for real money. As of June, the average number of users playing it at the same time on Steam, a video-game marketplace, was 400,000. It briefly became Steam’s most-played game, with over 890,000 simultaneous players. 

But here's the twist. The anonymous developers of "Banana" told Polygon that only about a third of those players were humans, the rest being bot accounts running the free game many times at once on the same computer, racking up valuable rewards. And the developers don't seem particularly bothered about that.

Clicker games are the product of stripping a game down to nothing but the microtransactions and trading elements, which is likely why the developers of “Banana” don't care if it's bots or humans playing, so long as users are buying and trading content. They're earning about 10% of every sale between players, human or not.

The success of "Banana" is another example of how much our digital lives have been devoured by automation. It’s also the logical end point of video-game microtransactions. Is engagement with the game authentic or inauthentic? Who cares, so long as people are spending money. And if metrics are to be trusted — and that's a big "if" — this might be the future of video games.

“Banana” is not the first clicker game to go viral. In 2013, “Cookie Clicker” became the first big clicker, or "idle game," to really break through. The main gameplay mechanic for all these games is exactly what the name implies. You click what is on the screen — whether it’s a cookie, a monster, or an anime character — over and over to earn rewards. It's worth noting that this whole genre of video game started out as a joke.

While many video games feature leveling up or other kinds of satisfying progression, clicker games streamline that experience into the game’s entire appeal. They virtually always allow you to let the game run in the background, which even automates the clicking for you. You can just enjoy watching the numbers go up on their own. It's weird, but even non-scammy players do it.

In February, the clicker format was changed by a game called “Egg.” “Egg” added support for Steam Trading, meaning the rewards that players earned from clicking the egg — in this case, different “skins” to customize the egg’s appearance — could be sold for any other in-game item across all of Steam. You could even buy them with real-world money using Steam Wallet.

“Egg” was a huge success. Within its first day, over 1,000 people simultaneously played the game. Traders immediately rushed in and focused on earning the rarest eggs. Some especially unusual eggs still go for over $100.

The “Egg” craze ended relatively quickly, which is par for the course with clicker games. Unsurprisingly, what makes them so addicting tends to burn players out. According to our data, “Egg” was dethroned on Steam charts by April, just as “Banana” began to build a player base. “Banana” had a much slower rise to the top of the Steam charts, but eventually started to build word-of-mouth buzz once the pseudonymous developers began crowdsourcing banana-skin designs from players. (It’s not uncommon for these kinds of games to appear out of nowhere, made by developers no one knows the real identity of.) If your skin got accepted, you'd get recognition and an item potentially worth hundreds of dollars in Steam Wallet money.

The marketplace of "Banana," which includes the ability to trade bananas with other users as well as buy a small number directly from the developers, is the real draw of the game. In many ways, it’s easy to think of the bananas as their own currency that happens to be attached to a game, since the design of the game is minimal and unengaging even by the standards of clicker games. 

It's Steam Wallet that's the real engine driving these new clicker games. Steam Wallet was launched in 2010 with microtransactions debuting a few weeks later in game studio Valve's hugely influential shooter game “Team Fortress 2.” A year later, Valve, which also owns Steam, introduced Steam Trading, which lets players trade in-game items and currency with each other. The breakdown for Steam Trading is usually 5% to Valve, 10% to the developers of the game, and 85% to the player. 

The Steam Community Market became so complicated that within a year they had to hire former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis to run it. It’s also had a number of economic crises, usually because of glitches. But last year Valve made an estimated $1 billion from just one kind of loot box in “Counter-Strike.” 

It's not just Steam that's filling up with bots. Earlier this month we discovered a blockchain-based clicker game called “Hamster Kombat” that runs on Telegram. The game rewards players not just for clicking but for engaging with the game's social accounts on platforms like X and YouTube. Its developers are promising a cryptocurrency windfall for players later this month, when the game plans to release a crypto token that will correlate with in-game currency.

The problem, though, is that we don't actually know how big these games are. The developers of "Banana" estimate a third of its "players" are individual humans, which seems high. Likewise, with “Hamster Kombat,” the overwhelming majority of account engagement comes from bots copying and pasting the same message under all their posts: "Thanks to the Hamster Team for supporting our country." The result is essentially self-perpetuating spam. Click the button, receive coins, trade coins, profit. 

So while technically “Banana” is saying it has more players than mega-bestsellers like “Hogwarts Legacy” or “Baldur's Gate 3,” that's not really true. It's like comparing the views of a single TikTok video to the Hollywood box office. But this also opens a window into the bizarre state of the internet. For years, we judged content — movies, TV shows, music, video games, memes, trends — based on how popular it was online. We could get numbers attached to them that felt semi-reliable. Now, not only can you easily buy followers, replies, and likes; you can also buy players. And it's hard to imagine ways to fix this macro trend toward meaningless metrics, not just in gaming, but everywhere.

As one of the top comments on Steam page of "Banana" put it, "People are idiots."

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. And we'll be sharing some of our findings here in Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.