Dear readers, I made the mistake of taking a day off this week - and, like a time traveler stepping on a butterfly, I may have moved a series of dominoes. Or we just collectively lost our grip on reality. Banana, the game I covered last week, has completely exploded in popularity.

If you're not familiar with it, Banana is a clicker game that won't actually be played by the client itself. Actual.exe is very bare bones, shiny.There is no banana png, the ability to click on it and raise the numbers, and nothing else.

The real pulp of "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, usually go for just a cent in the market (a rare banana is quite

the actual ability to make money from this is more speculative than anything else — maybe you can nest thousands of bananas in an egg and wait for the market to change, but you can't Whatever the number of concurrent players is, I don't know if things will go your way.

Almost exactly the moment I chose to rest my tired head in the middle of the night,June4/5 (I actually want to stay until 3am, but let's make a good decision so that we can live in a cold and untimely universe where success is entirely derived by chance or make a popular game with the power of my spiritual dreams). I have chosen to believe the latter because I feel a bit fragile at the moment.

At first I was resting on a cozy 34,000 concurrency, and while I thought my stupid, naive self was impressive a week ago, Banana started accelerating at the speed of about 25,000 concurrent players every 24 hours. Then 6/6 Thursday, at midnight utc, the numbers began to explode like a volcano above Pompeii — bananas shot between 84,000 and 134,000 simultaneous users during the 11 hours.

At the time of writing, Banana is currently 30,000 more people playing it than Elden Ring, a game that has a ton of hype behind its upcoming DLC shoot, maybe we should play Banana instead.

This, unfortunately, does not throw an air of speculation over the game itself. This structure can virtually be exploited by bots. To be fair, games on Steam require users to agree to a third-party EULA. In it, they strictly "prohibit the use of unauthorized third-party software, scripts, bots, or other means to cheat, exploit, automate, or manipulate the Game in any way.""

Other than the players who stopped the process Hi' will be much more complicated. Look, I want to be charitable to bananas, because I think the rules of this whole movement — it's like Nft, but they're memes and strangers with deep pockets but I don't think this game has a sophisticated anti-cheat. I just don't. When you click on the banana, the numbers go up. That's the whole thing.

A look at the game's Steam forum doesn't give much hope for innocence for now — Banana doesn't pull the buzz of the 100,000+ number community. At the time of writing, the oldest post on the first page of the banana forum was 5 hours ago. In contrast, for example, Elden Ring — the oldest post on its first page is less than an hour.

The Discord community of games that have to go to participate in real banana meta games also has about 15,000 members at the time of writing. This is impressive, don't misunderstand me, but it's also just 11% of the player base.

Thanks to bots on Discord's welcome channel, the number of presages since Monday this week has been around 11,500, give-or-take, so the increase in Discord users is not proportional. Usually, that's not a doubt, but I can't stress how few games are actually played on Steam here. Flogging the community and your product is the whole point of the thing, and who is flying the plane if discord is not proportionally active and the forum is not proportionally active.

This is all speculation at the moment, but still. Nevertheless, I have made an effort to try and reach out to developers through the game discord, and if I receive a response, I might have this story

but the monkey's legs curl very well for bananas. Supply and demand are linked, and when an army of automaton banana farmers creates banana panoramas on the Steam market, it becomes the source of many banana dramas. If they are indeed breaking the rules, the humble players doing it by the book are about to be outcompeted by an influx of unusual drops. No one will go to the Internet and lie, but surely TF2 has Valve taking care of it. oh, my god!.