'Banana', a game where you rapidly click on a jpeg of a banana and nothing else, has an all-time peak of 31,124 players on Steam—here's why

If you happen to check the SteamDB charts from time to time, you might be wondering why Banana, a free-to-play game where you ostensibly just click on a jpeg of a banana and nothing else, is currently sat at number 47—just four ranks shy of Cyberpunk 2077, and ranking above actual videogames like Fallout 76, Diablo 4, Slay the Spire, the list goes on.

So was I. So were all of us at PC Gamer, actually, sitting in a call this morning, staring baffled at tens of thousands of active players all clicking a jpeg. Because my torrid work is never finished, I bravely jumped on the grenade and did a little digging—turns out, there's a whole genre of these things, which I shall henceforth dub «egglikes» because I have lost my mind.

Like soulslike games, egglikes—again, a term I have fully just invented—spawned from the older (and thus less popular) Egg, which still has over 4,500 people playing it as I write this (with an all-time peak of 11,000 players). Egg is very similar to Banana in that you click on a picture of an egg for the vast majority of your playtime, though you'll mostly be leaving it idle if you value your sanity.

The real games attached to Egg and Banana have precious little to do with the client. Instead, they have everything to do with Steam inventory items. You might have a few of these suckers sitting in your inventory as we speak—earned by playing games you own, these items can be sold on the marketplace for cash that goes into your Steam wallet, or traded 1:1. 

They're slightly different from the trading cards you're more likely to have knocking around—more like the Banana game's version of TF2 hats. Their prices can fluctuate based on varying factors, meaning that it's technically possible to buy low and sell high.

Banana is absolutely a derivative egglike—no, really. The game's creator, Robert Partyson (I somehow do not think that is their real name) wrote «this is just a worse made egg game» on the game's Steam forums. «Lol,» he added.

Breaking it