Nfts
New Game NFTs: Banana Clicker Game Steam Market Collectibles Explode in Price
The meteoric rise of the free-to-play clicker game Banana is a watershed moment in gaming that indie developers and scammers alike will study for years to come, no matter how you choose to explain it.
In just over a month, this clicker game, developed by a team of three, has skyrocketed up the Steam charts to become one of the most played games on the platform.
Captivating next-gen Banana gameplay. Image via Sky
Banana’s gameplay is as simple as its title. Players are presented with a single image of a banana against a sickly green pea soup background. If you click on the banana, a counter at the top of the screen (in white, unadorned Arial font) increases by one. That’s it. Every few hours a so-called “banana peel” falls off, but that’s all we have to break the monotony. There’s no progression structure or upgrades like other games in the clicker genre; It’s really just you and the banana.
On paper, Banana is just another oddity of an increasingly post-ironic Internet. Memes have turned the tide of politics and pop culture, after all, so surely it’s not beyond their capabilities to propel a free indie game to superstardom? We couldn’t discover the secret of banana sauce in our initial coveragebut there are slightly darker forces at work behind Banana when you look beyond its peeling outer layer (sorry).
According to Steam Database, Banana has surpassed the all-time high of over 750,000 players, with some players featured in Steam reviews having already logged several hundred hours. That’s a lot of dedication for seemingly no payoff, but the problem here is that players expect a payoff. Oddly enough, these aforementioned “banana skins” can’t actually be applied to the in-game banana itself (although the developers say the feature will come at some point). Instead, they are added directly to your Steam inventory, making them eligible for trading and listing on the Community Market. Do you see where this is going?
Banana creates its own Steam economy, bypassing that of the platform. rules on content related to cryptocurrencies peddling items that are NFTs in all but name – completely useless, even in their original game, but with their value artificially increased by speculation, FOMO and artificial scarcity. Special bananas are also distributed on the game’s Discord server, in the microtransaction store, and during limited-time in-game events that keep players tuned in.
In the community market, the rarest bananas are currently selling for prices close to $800, with the highest sale ever recorded well over $1,300. These digital fruits are resold by players who hope that another player will buy them for more in the hope of reselling them for more, and so on. Their lack of intrinsic value or utility means that this very expensive game of hot potato is the only potential application for these bananas, and those who hold them when the hype dies down are the losers.
But what does this mean for developers? Well, for starters, game developers take a share of every transaction on the community market for their specific game, meaning that keeping prices high and trading is in the developers’ direct financial interest.
If that’s not enough, there’s the fact that all three developers have made their Steam inventories private since Banana’s launch, and banana peel sales on the Community Market are anonymous. While there’s no way to be sure, with the developers going out of their way to make sure no one knows what bananas they have, it would be extremely easy for them to get into the business themselves. As holders of the metaphorical keys to the kingdom, they can create new bananas themselves at zero cost and exchange them for hundreds of dollars on the market (although it is unlikely that they will actually do so).
Indeed, there is a good chance that many players are simply Web 3 speculators looking to build a digital portfolio. They have been involved in what amounts to a massive pyramid scheme and, while it is possible that some are making a profit on Banana, they are lining the developers’ pockets in doing so. It’s a story as old as time, but this is the first time it’s been implemented on such a scale in the mainstream gaming space.
Despite Banana’s meteoric rise, we’re still far from the heights of crypto excess. $800 is a drop in the ocean compared to what the most expensive NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection were fetching, and it feels more like an attempt to squeeze a few last dollars out of the culture that the movement has cultivated rather than a complete project. -on resurgence. After all, monkeys eat bananas.
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