Why viral Banana clicker is still dominating Steam charts, spawning lots of imitators

polygon.com:

Since June, one of Steam’s most popular games is hardly a game at all: You just click a banana to make the number go up.

At its peak, more than 917,000 people had the game, called Banana, open on their computers. Every so often, Banana drops a Steam item into the player’s inventory — one of dozens of specially decorated bananas. You only have to click every so often in order to get these intermittent drops, so all of those players weren’t necessarily actively clicking their respective bananas, but simply had the program open. Though Banana’s concurrent player count has dropped by hundreds of thousands of players, it still hasn’t dropped from Steam’s top five games, averaging over 300,000 players at any given time.

Why is it popular? Because the bananas have value on Steam. In an interview with Polygon, community manager Hery said it’s basically a legal “infinite money glitch.” Most bananas are worth pennies, but it’s still pennies that can be spent on the Steam store. Many of the rarer bananas are currently selling for a hundred bucks or so, down from several bananas that sold into the thousands. Hery also told Polygon that, back when the game first started to rise, a decent amount of the concurrent users were bots, which likely helped the game’s rapid ascent up the Steam charts. But once people knew about it, lots of real players got involved, too.

Banana’s success has inspired a wave of copycats: Now you can click on butts, watches, cats, dogs, raspberries, milk, and melons. The premise is the same for all of these games — they generate Steam inventory items of different rarities. The money to be made is negligible, but it’s still money that can be spent on the Steam store. There are at least four dozen of these sorts of clicker games available largely for free on Steam, but it wasn’t Banana that started the trend. That was Egg, which was released in February. Its trajectory — like the other copies — is similar to Banana’s. People started playing Egg as a meme