If it goes viral on Steam, it’ll get cloned: Wildly popular banana clicker, currently beating Elden Ring by Steam players, spawns apple and melon competitors
“Friday energy” is a phrase we use here in the GR+ office to indicate the orderly, coherent flow of work conversation officially degrading into chaos, the result of five full days of sustained professionalism finally taking its toll. Well, this story has Friday energy, so buckle up kids.
Banana is a free “idle clicker” where you slam your left click button into a jpeg of a banana over and over and get a new banana every three hours to add to your Steam collection for your effort. You do nothing else in Banana except click bananas, and yet astoundingly, at the time of writing, Banana is the third most played game on Steam according to this official chart. It even beats Elden Ring, which just got its massively popular Shadow of the Erdtree DLC less than two weeks ago.
Explaining some of Banana’s inexplicable explosion in popularity, it turns out there’s a whole economy where you can buy and sell the fruit you earn in these types of games. And yes, thanks to PC Gamer’s sleuthing, I now know there’s a whole genre of “egglikes” (PC Gamer’s term, not mine) that started with, you guessed it, a game where you click on eggs to earn eggs and then sell them. It’s all very silly, and even Banana creator Robert Partyson said “this is just a worse made egg game” on the game’s Steam forums.
Despite not being the originator of this very silly video game, well, I hesitate to say genre, Banana is far and away the one that’s achieved the most popularity so far. And spawning from its still-ripe hide like some sort of deformed seeds are even more egglikes. That’s right, meet Melon, currently enjoying a robust all-time peak player count of 14,274, and Tapple, slightly ahead of Melon at 16,574 at the time of writing.
To clear any confusion and to prevent y’all from quitting your jobs to become banana clickers, PC Gamer reports that most bananas sell for a few cents, and even the uber rare varieties like the diamond banana are fetching around $80 on average. I’m not sure how long it takes to earn a banana that would sell for that amount, and frankly I refuse to sacrifice my dignity to find out.