NFTs
New gaming NFTs: Banana clicker game Steam Market collectibles are exploding in price
The meteoric rise of free-to-play clicker game Banana is a watershed moment in gaming that indie developers and hustlers alike will be studying for years to come, however you choose to explain it.
In just over a month, this clicker game – developed by a team of three – shot up the Steam charts and became one of the most played games on the platform.
Fascinating next-gen Banana gameplay. Image via sky
Banana’s gameplay is as simple as the title. Players are presented with a single image of a banana against a sickly pea soup green background. If you click on the banana, a counter at the top of the screen (in unadorned white Arial font) goes up one point. And that. Every few hours, a so-called “banana peel” will fall off, but that’s all it takes to break the monotony. There is 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 quirk of an increasingly post-ironic Internet. After all, memes have changed the tide of politics and pop culture, so surely it’s not beyond your capabilities to take a free-to-play indie game to stardom? We couldn’t discover the secret of the banana sauce in our initial coveragebut there are slightly darker forces at work behind the Banana when you look beyond its peeling outer layer (sorry).
According to SteamDB, Banana has surpassed its all-time peak of over 750,000 players, with some players in Steam analytics having already accumulated several hundred hours. It’s a lot of dedication with seemingly no reward – but the trick here is that players are expecting a reward. Surprisingly, these aforementioned “banana peels” can’t actually be applied to the game’s own banana (although the developers claim the functionality will arrive at some point). Instead, they are added directly to your Steam inventory, making them eligible for trading and listing on the Community Market. See where this is going?
Banana is creating its own Steam economy, bypassing the platform rules on cryptocurrency-related content selling items that are NFTs in all but name – completely worthless, even in their game of origin, but with their value artificially inflated by speculation, FOMO, and artificial scarcity. Special bananas are also distributed on the game’s Discord server, microtransaction store, and limited-time in-game events that keep players on their toes.
On the Community Market, the rarest bananas currently fetch prices approaching 800 dollars, with the highest recorded sale reaching well over 1,300 dollars. These digital fruits are being resold by players hoping another player will buy them for more, hoping to resell them for more, and so on. Their lack of intrinsic value or utility means that this high-cost hot potato game is the only potential application for these bananas, and those who hold on to them when the hype dies down are the losers.
But what does this bring for developers? Well, for starters, game developers take a slice of every Community Market transaction for your specific game, which means that keeping prices high and making negotiations happen is in the developers’ direct financial interest.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s the fact that all three developers have made their Steam inventories private since Banana’s launch, and that banana peel sales on the Community Market are anonymous. While there’s no way to know for sure, developers going to great lengths to ensure no one knows which bananas they have would make it extremely easy for them to enter the trade. As those who hold the metaphorical keys to the kingdom, they can create new bananas for themselves at zero cost and sell them for hundreds of dollars on the Market (although it is unlikely that they are actually doing so).
In fact, odds are good that many of the players are simply Web 3 speculators looking to build a digital wallet for themselves. They have been involved in what amounts to a huge pyramid scheme – and while it is possible for some to make a profit from Banana, they are lining the developers’ pockets by doing so. It’s a story as old as time, but this is the first time it’s been implemented in the mainstream gaming space on such a scale.
Despite Banana’s meteoric rise, however, it is still a long way from the height of crypto excess. $800 is a drop in the bucket compared to what more expensive NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection were fetching, and if anything this seems like another attempt to squeeze a few last dollars out of the culture the movement has cultivated, rather than a complete -in resurgence. After all, monkeys eat bananas.
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