Banana Game Sees Sharp Decline in Steam Player Numbers

After reaching its peak in June 2024, Banana on Steam has since experienced a significant decrease in concurrent players. This article delves into the reasons behind its popularity and the factors contributing to its decline.

Banana Game Steam Charts Show Massive Decline

It’s a Clicker Game About Bananas…

Banana on Steam, launched on April 23, 2024, is a seemingly simple clicker game that quickly rose to prominence. It achieved an all-time peak of 917,272 players in June 2024. However, the game has yet to reach those heights again. According to SteamDB, there has been a significant decline in player numbers from November 2024 up to the present.

For those unfamiliar with Banana, it is a free-to-play clicker game that breaks traditional gaming norms. The gameplay is minimalistic, requiring players to click on a banana image repeatedly. The game's allure, however, lies not in its simplicity but in the potential financial rewards. Players can acquire virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market, with some rare items, like the "Special Golden Banana," fetching high prices, once sold for $1,378.58.

The meteoric rise of Banana can be attributed to several factors. Initially, the prospect of earning Steam Wallet funds with minimal effort attracted a significant number of players. Hery, the team developer, even described the game as a "legal 'Infinite money glitch'" in an interview with Polygon in June 2024. However, this surge in popularity also drew in automated bots designed to farm these valuable drops, artificially inflating the player count.

"Unfortunately, we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC," Hery told Polygon. "People are abusing up to 1,000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk."

The developers implemented bot prevention measures in May 2024, but it remains uncertain whether the current 100,000+ players are genuine. Post-peak, the game's concurrent player count experienced a sharp decline. By July 2024, the average number of players had dropped to 549,091. This downward trend continued, with November 2024 seeing a significant drop from 400,000 to just above 100,000. Despite a brief increase at the start of 2025, the game has not fully rebounded from this decline.

Currently, Banana holds strong with 112,966 concurrent players and ranks 7th on Steam's Most Played Games list. However, a sudden dip to around 50,000 players was observed on March 16th, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The reason for this dip is unclear, and it's difficult to determine if bots were involved. The general trend of decreasing player counts suggests that the game's initial novelty may be waning.

The developers have been actively updating the game with trading cards, event drops, and quality-of-life improvements. They have also engaged the community by allowing user-generated banana art through the Steam Workshop, with creators earning a percentage of sales. Whether these efforts will help the game regain its former glory without relying on bots remains to be seen.