This year we've already had several unexpectedly successful game releases, such as Palworld, which has over 25 million players worldwide and was played by over 2 million people simultaneously on Steam alone. There was also Helldivers 2, which was Sony's most successful PC game release.
According to Polygon, most likely half of these players are just bots that automatically click on a banana to get a new custom banana in their Steam inventory every three hours, whether it's gold, black, or silver.
However, even despite the problem with bots, the game has an active audience of real players who also play Banana to get various skins that can later be sold on the Steam market.
While most of these bananas cost cents, there are also unique cases, such as Crypticnana, a banana that sells for as little as 32,303 UAH on the market, with the highest price reaching 73,693 UAH. One of Banana's developers, Hery, says that the game has become so popular because it is actually a legal "infinite money glitch."
“I do believe that the reason why it mostly caught on is because it’s a legal ‘Infinite money glitch. Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items,” says Hery.
And all because people actually buy these bananas. It's not entirely clear why, but they do. In this way, users can receive cents, but still practically free money to their Steam account.