banana
If you’ve been paying attention to the most played games on Steam lately, you’ve probably seen a strange one: Banana. It’s a game about clicking bananas. That’s it. That’s it.
However, Banana currently has over 420,000 simultaneous players. As of 1 hour ago And things are just getting a little worse. reason The game you are playing and the game you are actually playing, i.e. the countless bots.
The game is a money-making machine; clicking repeatedly earns you banana “skins” in the game that you can sell, much like Counterstrike, so you can actually make money by clicking. Most skins sell for 3 cents, but some have gone up in the tens or even hundreds of dollars. The current high seems to be $1,345.
The problem is that most of the people playing are bots. This is because members of the development team Helly confirmed to Polygon:
“Unfortunately, we are currently facing an issue with bots. Because the game basically uses 1% or none of your PC’s resources, people are abusing up to 1000 alternate accounts in order to get rarer drops, or at least larger quantities of them.”
banana
At last count, only a third of players were “real” and the rest were bots. At the time, the game had 141,000 players, but that percentage may have increased by now. Hery says he has enlisted Valve’s help to stop this, but I suspect Valve will do more than that.
Helly acknowledges that the game is set up as a “legitimate infinite money making bug.” Players play the most basic game on the planet for free, find skins, and sell them for cash. So it’s a marketplace. People are paying for these skins for some reason, even expensive ones. But I think Valve will step in and make new rules about games like this so that the service isn’t suddenly flooded with them. This game is making money for Valve, players, and developers. I mean, it probably takes more than one person or a minimal team to make/operate a game like this, but this… can’t continue, right? A banana game made with bots that’s always at the top of Steam?
So far, it doesn’t seem like the bots are going away, and there’s been no announcement from Valve’s side, but as we all know, Valve is famously silent most of the time. I doubt this will last forever, but if not, I’m curious how it will end and what the justification is.
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