"Banana Game Sees Sharp Decline in Steam Player Count"

After reaching its peak in June 2024, Banana on Steam has experienced a significant decline in concurrent players. This article delves into the game's popularity and the reasons behind its player drop-off.

Banana Game Steam Charts Show Massive Decline

It’s a Clicker Game About Bananas…

Banana on Steam, launched on April 23, 2024, is a seemingly simple clicker game that quickly gained massive popularity, achieving an all-time peak of 917,272 players in June 2024. However, the game has not been able to match those numbers since. According to SteamDB, a significant decline in player count was observed from November 2024 to the present.

For those unfamiliar, Banana is a free-to-play clicker game that defies traditional gaming conventions. The game's simplicity is its hallmark; players click on a banana image repeatedly. The real draw, however, is the potential for financial gain. Players can acquire virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market, with some rare items like the "Special Golden Banana" fetching prices as high as $1,378.58.

The game's meteoric rise can be attributed to the allure of earning Steam Wallet funds with minimal effort. Developer Hery described the game as a "legal ‘Infinite money glitch,’" in a June 2024 interview with Polygon. This surge in popularity also attracted automated bots designed to farm valuable drops, artificially inflating the player count.

"Unfortunately, we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC," Hery told Polygon. "People are abusing up to 1,000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk."

In response, the developers implemented bot prevention measures in May 2024. Despite these efforts, the game's concurrent player count saw a sharp decline post-peak. By July 2024, the average number of players had dropped to 549,091. This downward trend continued, with November 2024 witnessing a further drop from 400,000 to just above 100,000 players. Although the game saw a momentary doubling of its player count at the start of 2025, it has not been able to recover from the decline.

Currently, Banana holds steady with 112,966 concurrent players and ranks 7th on Steam's Most Played Games list. However, a significant drop to around 50,000 players was observed on March 16th, 2025, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The cause of this sudden dip remains unclear, and it's challenging to ascertain the involvement of bots. The overall trend of decreasing player counts suggests that the game's initial novelty may be waning.

The developers have been actively updating the game with trading cards, event drops, and quality-of-life improvements. They've also engaged the community by allowing user-generated banana art through the Steam Workshop, with creators earning a percentage of sales. Whether these efforts will help Banana regain its peak without the aid of bots remains to be seen.