Last year we reported on a phenomenon that, frankly, left PC Gamer's editorial team a little baffled. We were in one of our morning meetings when someone shared Banana, a free-to-play game available on Steam where you click on an image of a banana, but what was mind-blowing were the player counts. This was in May 2024 and, at the time, tens of thousands of players were just… clicking away on bananas.
The intrepid Harvey Randall looked into Banana's success, and discovered an entire genre which he dubbed "Egglikes" after the ur-culprit turned out to be the game that inspired banana: Egg. Again, you click an egg.
As you may have gathered, the "game" here is really the trappings outside of the game itself. Egglikes are all about the Steam marketplace and generating items that can be sold, mostly for pennies, with Banana serving up a banana item roughly every three hours and a "rare drop pool" that drops once every 18 hours. There are even special event bananas.
So there's one explanation for why the concurrents were getting so massive. Banana is a game that you don't really need to play but, if you're into it, you probably have it idling on your PC at least once a day in order to get your bananas.
What's amazing is that Banana only seems to have gathered momentum since those early days. The game is now the 13th most-played game on Steam, with over 100,000 people currently in-game, a ranking that puts it just below Apex Legends but above titles like Warframe, Call of Duty, Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Rainbow Six: Siege, and EA Sports FC.
Yes, I'm comparing apples to bananas there, but come on: This thing beating out Call of Duty—a unified launcher, so Banana is beating all the Call of Duty games on Steam put together—is hilarious. And plenty about this game is just straight-up amusing, such as the banana drop rates. Banana has "rare" and "epic" bananas that have a 0.1% and 0.01% chance of dropping, but that's chicken feed: This thing contains "ultra rare" bananas with a one in 400,000 chance of dropping, and "legendary" bananas with, wait for it, a one in 10,000,000 chance.
A one in ten million banana jpeg. BRB, booting up Banana.
The thing about Banana is it's impossible to dislike because, while this may have a slight whiff of sketchiness about it, this is also a genre that a sizeable contingent of people seem to enjoy playing around with and, outside of the Legendary bananas, we're talking about pretty low stakes in almost every other case: And the Banana people just seem, well, kinda nice.
"The community has less of that big tech bro stank about it," as Harvey wrote last year, "and reminds me more of kids trading rocks in a playground, and I mean that as a compliment. I feel like I cracked open a door expecting to stumble into some secret mafia hideout and instead found a bunch of relatively chill dudes racing their pet snails."
And now there's even more chill banana-fanciers getting in on that hot clicker action. Banana is free-to-play, if you fancy trying out for that Legendary fruit.
