Banana Game Sees Sharp Decline in Steam Players

After reaching its peak in June 2024, Banana on Steam has since experienced a decrease in concurrent players. Dive deeper to understand its popularity and the factors contributing to its player decline.

Banana Game Steam Charts Show Massive Decline

It’s a Clicker Game About Bananas…

For those new to the game, Banana is a free-to-play clicker game that breaks the mold of traditional gaming. Launched in April 2024, its gameplay is minimalistic, centered around clicking a banana image repeatedly. The real attraction, however, is the potential for financial gain. Players can collect virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market, with some rare items, like the "Special Golden Banana," fetching high prices, such as $1,378.58.

The game's rapid rise to fame can be attributed to several key factors. The promise of earning Steam Wallet funds with minimal effort initially drew in a large player base. In a June 2024 interview with Polygon, team developer Hery described the game as a "legal ‘Infinite money glitch.’" This surge in popularity, however, also attracted automated bots designed to farm 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."

In response, the developers introduced bot prevention measures in May 2024. It remains unclear how many of the game's 100,000+ players are genuine. Following these measures, the game's concurrent player count saw a sharp decline. By July 2024, the average number of players had dropped to 549,091. This downward trend persisted, with November 2024 seeing a significant decrease from 400,000 to just over 100,000 players. Despite a brief surge at the start of 2025, the game has not recovered from this decline.

Currently, Banana maintains a strong presence with 112,966 concurrent players and ranks 7th on Steam's Most Played Games list. However, a notable drop to around 50,000 players was observed on March 16th, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The cause of this sudden dip remains unclear, and it's challenging to ascertain the involvement of bots. The overall trend of declining player counts suggests that the game's initial novelty may be fading.

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