Bare bones Steam item generator Banana rakes in over 100,000 concurrents in the span of a few days—reaches top 10 on Steam's 'most played'

Dear reader, I made the mistake of having a day off this week—and, like a time traveller stepping on a butterfly, I might have set a series of dominoes in motion. Either that or we've just collectively lost our grip on reality. Banana, a game I covered last week, has completely exploded in popularity.

In case you're unfamiliar, Banana is a clicker game that's not really played in the client itself. The actual .exe is extremely bare-bones, featuring a glossy .png of a banana, the ability to click it and make a number go up, and nothing else.

The real pulp of the 'nana, if you will, is in the game's bustling Steam item economy. These items, which can be traded and sold for cash in your Steam wallet, typically go for mere cents on the market (though rare bananas will sell for quite a bit more).

The actual ability to make money off this thing is more speculative than anything—maybe you could nest egg a few thousand bananas and wait for the market to change, but I'm not sure things are going to go your way if the concurrent player count's anything to go by.

At almost exactly the moment I chose to rest my weary head at midnight, June 4/5 (I'd actually stayed up until 3AM, but let's pretend I make good decisions) the game's player count began to rise. I am choosing to believe these two events are directly related, because either we live in a cold and uncaring universe where success is derived entirely by chance, or I can create popular games with my psychic dream powers. I'm feeling a little fragile at the moment, so I am choosing to believe the latter.

Initially resting at a cosy 34,000 concurrents, which my silly, naive self thought was impressive a week ago, Banana began to accelerate at a rate of roughly 25,000 additional concurrent players every 24 hours. Then on Thursday, June 6, at midnight UTC, the numbers began to explode like the volcano over Delphi—with Banana shooting from 84,000 to 134,000 concurrent users in the space of 11 hours.

At the time of writing,