Do you click a banana?

I like bacon

I like chocolate 🍫 (=^_^=)

An extremely low effort way to make (a lot of?) money for the few people that cash in early enough, especially the developer.

why do people buy these skins

Because they think they're buying them low today, to sell them for a lot more later. Same as when people buy NFTs and meme crypto, and IMO that's how this will end up. Once the developer and a few others that cash in early sell their bananas for exorbitant prices (as far as Steam items go), they'll leave with the money. Everyone else will be left holding the bag, since no more people will want to keep buying useless bananas to drive the prices up.

And the copycat games appear for the same reason, the developer can make out like a bandit after an initial price pump, and the "game" probably takes a few minutes to make. Kind of wish Steam did something about it but they probably won't since nothing illegal is happening, just scummy. And Valve takes a cut of every market sale anyway.

I mean I did eat 2 bananas today if that counts.

I know for a fact that the egg one was just free with no monetization whatsoever so it garnered a lot of positive reviews for just being an absolute meme - https://steamcommunity.com/id/coolcatfan55/recommended/2784840/
Egg seems to have added skins after the fact to capitalize on the success of Banana or maybe it was all just one big scam from the start (this is pretty tin-foil hat theory and I doubt this is true). to farm positive meme reviews, then monetize it to trick people into thinking the game deserved money (based on the positive reviews).
If Egg was playing the long con, It's kind of a scam/trick similar to the Nintendo Switch eshop where they discount a game to 1 cent at 99.9% off, then they take off the discount. How the eShop calculated top seller was based on # of sold in a set time * price of the game at current time. They farm 1000 sales at 1 cent each, which isn't a lot and won't put them on the radar on the eshop, but once it goes back to full price at $10, the eShop calculated it as the #1 top seller and they trick people into buying an absolute trash can of a game.

But for Banana, it seems to be built from the ground-up with monetization and maybe it got big from dumb meme guerilla (edit for DeliberateTaco: gorilla) marketing or maybe it was just a stupid meme game that no one thought would succeed but it blew up or maybe it was a calculated meme game (I kind of think this) that they expected to draw people in (like Palworld) as seen by their community market integration and drop system. Either way, right now it's just a meme game going off of hype (sprinkled in with FOMO with their drop system it seems) and then it'll die off and players will hold heavily de-valued banana items that they bought high based on hype and FOMO.

edit: I feel like I typed way too much on some dumb banana game lol but just my thoughts, I don't have strong beliefs in what I said since I only just found out about Banana yesterday and only looked up any information about it when this was posted.

Meow

There will be people who are going to try to capitilize on the banana craze. Just be careful as there's shitty people out there that will use this opportunity to put out similar "games" on the Steam store with miners/malware.

alot of speculation on the items it creates.... and who knows how many of the high priced ones are the dev listing items they generate for themselves.

It's a scam that only stop us from having more idiots in the world.

Like an immune system.

I feel like ppl who waste their time on things like this probably deserve it.

Boomerang Fu.

They just brought out a new DLC. Which I will definitely buy.

The Banana and Egg games are the only ones that are legit - the other clones are a scam/dangerous. I don't waste time with these things but if you hoped on this before it became popular, you could easily get a couple bucks just for setting an autoclicker while running these games and waiting for the drops to come.

So, you click on a banana for three hours to earn 25 cents, less Steam's cut? That doesn't seem highly motivational.

Some of the reviews are getting a lot of awards, and so Steam points. Maybe a handful of people make a very small amount of Steam credit. I don't see the point myself, but if you leave your PC on anyway, I guess it's worth it?

Isn't that a crypto scam?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aitVHsg0rWA

Ape together strong.

They won't stop until every food has a game! D:

Some say it's there for money laundering reasons, hence the very low effort of a "game"...
Better ignore it like the rest of the NFT stuff.

Memes and NFTs are possibly the worst disease coming out of the internet era and that's saying a lot.

Here's a decent video I watched the other day that explains in detail how the game works and why everyone is "playing" it. You just let the game idle in the background and then click the banana after so many hours of running and you get an item drop. Some of these items are common and pretty much worthless, but there are also very rare ones that are limited to a certain amount. Some people will pay very large amounts of money to collect these items thinking that they will go up in value because there is a small number of them, but in reality people are just going to stop playing the "game" and the items will be worthless.

It's a scam.

It's essentially a FOMO ~NFT cashout

It is funny to look at steam market and see that dev is making thousands a day from transaction fees... Why can't I be this morally corrupt... I might be rich too...

Before reading your article i thought it was just another adventure capitalist clicker. I just hope store won't be flooded with these.
Banana banana, as an avid eurovision viewer, i just know "give that wolf a banana before that wolf eats my grandma"

It's just some guys doing some speculation. They control the flow of the items and they are just creating your average pump and dump scheme using useless stuff with "meme value".

It's kinda like NFTs without the blockchain BS. That stuff may be worth something someday , but unless you're in their "insider group" to have info about the pumping/dumping cycles, chances are you will be stuck with a bunch of worthless pixels soon enough.