Banana Game Loses Majority of Steam Players

The Steam game Banana has seen a decline in concurrent players after hitting its peak in June 2024. Here’s what you need to know about the game’s popularity and the factors behind its player drop.

Banana Game Shows Significant Drop in Steam Player Numbers

A Clicker Game Centered on Bananas…

Banana arrived on Steam on April 23, 2024, and this deceptively simple clicker game quickly became a viral hit. It reached an all-time high of 917,272 concurrent players in June 2024. But since then, the game hasn’t been able to match that peak. Data from SteamDB indicates a substantial decline starting in November 2024 and continuing into the present.

For the uninitiated, Banana is a free clicker game that breaks the usual gaming mold. Released in April 2024, the title is intentionally minimalist. The core gameplay involves repeatedly clicking on an image of a banana. What makes it compelling, though, isn’t the gameplay—it’s the potential to earn real money. Players can collect virtual banana items and sell them on the Steam Community Market. Certain rare items have sold for impressive amounts; for example, one “Special Golden Banana” was purchased for $1,378.58.

The game’s explosive growth can be credited to several key elements. The initial appeal of making Steam Wallet money with little effort attracted a huge audience. In a June 2024 interview with Polygon, one of the developers, Hery, even referred to the game as a “legal ‘infinite money glitch.’” However, the popularity spike also led to an influx of automated bots created to farm valuable in-game drops. This artificially boosted the game’s 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.”

The development team added bot prevention methods in May 2024, but it’s still uncertain whether the current player base of over 100,000 consists entirely of real players. Following its peak, the game’s concurrent player numbers fell sharply. By July 2024, the average player count had dropped to 549,091. This downward pattern continued over the following months, with a steep fall from 400,000 to just above 100,000 in November 2024. Although the game briefly doubled its player numbers at the beginning of 2025, it hasn’t recovered from the overall decline.

Banana currently maintains a solid presence with 112,966 concurrent players and even sits in 7th place on Steam’s list of Most Played Games. However, a sharp dip to around 50,000 players occurred on March 16, between 17:00 and 23:00 UTC. The exact cause of this temporary drop is unknown, and it’s hard to say whether bots played a role. In any case, the broader trend of declining players is mostly due to the fading novelty of the game.

The developers have continued to support Banana with updates, such as trading cards, event drops, and quality-of-life improvements. They’ve also fostered community involvement by allowing players to submit custom banana artwork via the Steam Workshop, where creators earn a share of sales. Still, it seems unlikely that these efforts will help the game return to its former peak without the influence of bots.