Banana game

 

No one is ever truly prepared for what life throws at them. Usually that comes in the negative, where waves of misfortune and bad tides slam into you over and over until it washes you away with the seeping. But every now and then the good will descend, and leave you in just as dire a predicament as you struggle to figure out what exactly to do with it. I have been in both straits and I can say neither which is superior. Too easily are the good poisoned foul unexpectedly. That being said, I cannot say for certain whether the bubbling broil of seemingly impending controversy is a boon or hinderance to the developers of the 2024 smash hit epic game- Banana. (No, it's nothing to do with the Minions- for god's sake leave such thoughts far away from you mind!)

Banana comes across as one of those games that is made as part of a student project to prove programming potential- in both it's simplicity as well as the post-ironic "hah hah, so random!" spirit of the concept. It's a cookie clicker clone where this time it's a banana. It's an idle clicker, meaning just by having the thing open in the background you'll be wracking up the big numbers- and that is the extent of the game. Yep, this isn't one of those slightly more complex clicker games where you have to build up teams in order to take out certain big monsters on a quest of some sort. (I'd recommend 'Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms' for that. Pretty fun game!) This is the absolute bottom of the barrel Steam trash garbage-heap-of-game with little to no creative ingenuity or subversive passion put behind it. So why is it worth talking about?

I mean, Steam is inundated with Unreal Engine powered refuse every other second- it's like the spittoon of the video game publishing world- which I suppose is the price to pay for such an inherently low barrier to entry as Steam naturally possesses. But there is a distinction between the rest and Banana- because you see those other bargain basement games are lucky to score a buy purchases by the curious before the game is lost under the deluge- Banana, on the otherhand, is ranking as one of the most played games on Steam currently. And may I just say how happy I am that this phenom occurred after Summer Games Fest, so we didn't have to see Geoff venerate this embarrassment. (Okay, maybe I'm going a bit too hard on the game. Afterall, it isn't Assassin's Creed!)

But what makes the Banana game so popular? Great question- and I'm afraid the answer is not any hidden inherent creative twist that imbues some otherwise hidden value. Well- actually I guess it could be considered that depending on how you define 'creativity'. I suppose it can be considered somewhat creative to conceive of the idea of turning an idle clicker into a Gacha-esque trading card game using the Steam market place. Oh yeah, every few hours you get 'dropped' a badly made PNG of a Banana- as artistically devoid as NFT trash- with various degrees of rarity that you can sell to others for real money. That's right, it's yet another 'alternative source of money' grift games. Because we haven't had enough of those over the past few years.

At the very least this spits in the face of most of those others by showcasing just how easy a concept like that can be realised without even touching WEB3 infrastructure and avoiding crypto currency like the plague. You don't need to have a special online wallet with a special 36 digit key that needs to be maintained on a separate secure device you keep with you at all times- you just need a Steam account. Sure, that means you can't exactly extract those funds any easy way- but you're exactly going to be making the kind of money to pay for your electricity bill either- just funnel that cash back into buying better games, why not? (Even though the kind of money we're talking about is typically petty cash on the dollar unless you score those millions-to-one drops.)

Of course, nothing has managed to halt the copious levels of discourse the game has generated regarding just who is sitting down and actually running this game- namely what sort of systems the developer is putting in place in order to prevent market manipulation. You see, Banana's are handed out through random lottery, rarities, drop chances, all that important data is handled developer side and considering this is an indie title that dropped out of nowhere- there are absolutely no gaurdrails in place, and no repercussions hanging over them, to engage in a little bit of 'table tilting' so to speak. What if they want to drive up the price of a Banana they have a lot of in order to make a little extra scrip? What if they hand out rare bananas to their friends for free? Who would ever know?

Now to their credit the developers, probably still a little stunned by their joke game which was developed in order to riff on another decidedly less successful joke game from earlier this year, promises that they aren't up to anything untoward behind the scenes. In fact, it's apparently going around that they even let go one of their staff specifically for engaging in that exact form of 'giving friends' bananas, market trickery that people were worried about- which demonstrates both their willingness to try and keep the game clean, as well as the relative ease with which the developers could choose to rip their audience off at any time. Which means that if you choose to engage with this, you might just be grappling onto a ticking timebomb, praying it goes off in someone else's face before it blows up in yours.

This honestly gives me flashbacks of all the endless WEB3 currencies that are still coming out every other day, stuffed full of developers swearing hands down that they never would rug pull their audience and in fact have special tools in place to counter that very issue- who then go on to rug pull within the week. It's inevitable. Everytime. Thankfully this game isn't that deep into people's financial pockets, if they decide to screw with the market- all that will be wasted is people's time and the tiny amount of processing power required to keep this game open in the background. But something tells me people will get bored of this game long before that eventual heel turn will cause anything of a huge uproar. Just my suspicion.