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

Banana Game Steam Charts Show Massive Decline

It’s a Clicker Game About Bananas…

Banana on Steam, launched on April 23, 2024, quickly became a sensation in the gaming community. This seemingly simple clicker game reached an all-time peak of 917,272 players in June 2024. However, it has not managed to replicate those numbers since then, with a significant decline observed from November 2024 to the present, as reported by SteamDB.

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. Yet, the game's appeal lies not in its gameplay but in the potential for financial gains. Players can earn virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market, where rare items like the "Special Golden Banana" have sold for as much as $1,378.58.

The game's rapid rise to fame can be attributed to the allure of earning Steam Wallet funds with minimal effort, which team developer Hery described as a "legal 'Infinite money glitch,'" in a June 2024 interview with Polygon. This surge in popularity, however, also attracted automated bots aiming to farm these valuable drops, inflating the game's player count artificially.

"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 implemented bot prevention measures in May 2024. The effectiveness of these measures on the game's current player base of over 100,000 players remains uncertain. Nonetheless, the game's concurrent player count saw a sharp decline post-peak. By July 2024, the average number of players had dropped to 549,091, and this downward trend persisted, with November 2024 showing a significant drop from 400,000 to just over 100,000 players. Despite a momentary doubling of player count at the start of 2025, the game has yet to recover from this decline.

Currently, Banana holds a steady 112,966 concurrent players and ranks 7th on Steam's Most Played Games list. However, a sudden drop to around 50,000 players was observed on March 16th, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The cause of this dip remains unclear, and it's challenging to ascertain the involvement of bots. The general trend of decreasing player counts likely reflects the waning novelty of the game.

The developers have been proactive, regularly 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 share of the sales. Whether these efforts will help the game regain its peak without bot assistance remains to be seen.