Why clicker game Banana — the ‘legal infinite money glitch’ — is going viral on Steam

polygon.com:

What’s a banana worth? A diamond banana may be worth $70 or $165, depending on the day. The gentleman banana — a banana with a hat and dress shoes — is less than a dollar. The pickle banana, which is a banana-shaped pickle, is roughly $15. But most bananas, regardless of their looks, are worth just pennies — even the banana made of dark matter. Does any of this make sense to you? It shouldn’t, unless you’re one of the thousands of people “playing” Banana, an idle clicker game where you simply click a banana to make a number go up.

OK, so what is Banana? Once you download Banana and boot it up, a window will pop up. It’s a banana on a vomit green background. Click on the banana and the numbers will go up. I’m at 772. And… that’s it! You just click. Every so often, you’ll get a banana drop right into your Steam inventory: one of dozens of differently decorated bananas currently available, like the diamond or gentleman bananas. “Banana, with the own words of the dev theselions,Banana is pretty much a stupid game, a copy of Egg but way worse,” developer team member Hery told Polygon.

It would seem like more than 141,000 people are clicking on a banana right now, according to SteamDB. A lot of people are playing Banana, but the numbers aren’t quite right: Banana has a botting problem; Hery told Polygon that a third of that number is actual players — so around 47,000 people. (They’ve contacted Valve support to figure out how to stop it.)

“Unfortunately we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or atleast drops in bulk,” Hery said over Discord chat.

Now we’re getting closer to the value of the bananas: Each banana is an item that goes into your Steam inventory, where they can then be bought and sold on the Steam Marketplace. (They don’t do anything in-game.) It’s largely very low-stakes trading, as most bananas are worth