This article is reprinted from the WeChat public account: bad review (chaping321)
Written by | Zhang Dadong
Edit | Mangshan soldering iron head
The players said that China needed a domestic 3A, so the black myth Wukong appeared.
Presumably because cyber monkeys also need to eat electronic bananas, Banana became the hottest new game of June, with 90% rave reviews.
How popular is it? On Steam, Banana surpassed 400,000 concurrent streamers on June 14, and then it took a week to double that result, peaking at nearly 900,000.
In the past few days, the only game that is more popular than "Banana" is the 10,000-year-old evergreen CS2, and the old man's ring DLC that has just been released can't breathe in exhaust gas at all.
And Banana, a triple-A masterpiece and indie game, is only 60.8MB in size.
Yes, you read that right, a second after I clicked the download button, the computer popped up a prompt that the download was complete.
You don't have to wonder what the magic of a 60.8MB game is that more than 800,000 people play online at the same time.
Banana's gameplay is just as big as its size, and it's a bit of a bag.
The first sentence of its introduction on the Steam store page already sums up all of its gameplay: Banana is a clicker game. Clicker Game, that is, click game, after entering, "point" is over.
When you enter the game, a Unity engine prompt pops up, followed by a lone banana hanging in the center of the screen against a tawny background. Above the banana, there is also a number 0.
All you have to do is move your little hands and move your mouse to click on the banana. Every time you click on it, the number above the banana will also +1.
Every 3 hours, the game will drop a normal banana to your Steam account; Every 18 hours, the game also drops bananas with a higher rarity.
Maybe many old brothers will be confused and feel inexplicable about the popularity of "Banana".
But what if it's a free-to-play game that allows some people to make money at the same time?
As you may have noticed, there are two small buttons hidden in the bottom left and top right corners of the in-game screenshot above. The button in the upper right corner is the setting, but it can only set the resolution, allowing you to choose between full screen or windowing, there is nothing to say.
The focus is on the inconspicuous little button called shop in the bottom left corner, which hides the secret to Banana's popularity.
If you have an accelerator installed on your computer and can successfully access the Steam community, when you click this button, your computer will automatically pop up a browser page with the banana item store.
The Banana Item Shop, on the other hand, deals with Cyber Bananas that drop to your account every once in a while.
Do you think this banana has any value? It can't really do anything but collect. But when it can be circulated, everything is different.
In the Steam Market, the price of different quality bananas varies, but the point is, it supports player-to-player transactions and is linked to cash.
Speaking of which, there may be people who already understand: playing it = making money.
For example, the first two bananas I dropped could be sold for three cents.
If you're lucky enough to drop a sparkling cosmic banana, the price will naturally rise.
Moreover, this cyberbanana, it is really bought.
Just a few days ago, a banana sold for more than 10,000 yuan and a deal was reached.
The money earned is credited to the account in the form of a Steam balance that cannot be withdrawn.
However, players can buy CS2 or other game skins and accessories, and withdraw them in RMB on third-party platforms, although it is not recommended to do so.
At this point, everything looks fine.
After all, in CS2, the game will occasionally drop tradable cosmetics and chests for you.
For example, when I was playing CSGO in 2021, I accidentally dropped the weapon case that had just come out of the new version at that time, and finally sold it directly in the third-party APP for 50 yuan, and I had a lot of fun that dinner.
But Banana is so pure, so pure that the gameplay is basically zero, and the only focus is on trading.
It's just such a very magical "game", and there was basically no wind when it was first launched, and no one cared about it more than half a month ago.
On April 23, 2024, "Banana" was officially launched, and no one paid attention to it on the Internet, the big banana dance on the world's most popular banana Tiktok at that time.
It's that "big banana a big banana, you feel really amazing".
At that time, Banana was an egglike game at best - not that bananas and eggs looked alike, but that before Banana, there was a game called Egg, and the gameplay was the same as Banana: click on the egg, get the egg, sell it for money.
emmm, like egg is not what I said, it was the game developers who said it. His words are even more straightforward than mine: this is a rougher egg game.
The development team of Banana is probably from Germany, and they have no public history, but they have only developed another game, "Lass ich Sliden", which is translated from German to Chinese as "Let Me Slide".
This game costs 6 yuan,The quality is extremely poor,It doesn't feel as good as black cotton Wu Neng,The game is an open world composed of mountains, forests and grasslands,Players can walk around in it,The rest is gone。
It currently has only 40 player reviews, but since it also drops items in the game, it's pretty high overall, at 90%.
"Banana" started out like "Let Me Slide", and few people talked about it. What I usually do is very similar to "Egg", it's nothing more than giving you a unique banana for the holidays.
However, it is very different from "Egg", that is, it pays more attention to the market, and everything is for the market trading service.
Including the "clicker game" gameplay, it has also been optimized, players can go online every once in a while, and there is no need to hang the game in the background of the computer all the time.
In addition, high-value bananas will be deliberately added and eliminated, artificially creating scarcity, and providing continuous external stimulation to the market.
Of course, as the number of players increases, the number of cyber bananas dropped by the game will inevitably overflow.
However, the official has recycled bananas in various ways to regulate them. It is precisely because of this that "Banana" slowly became popular, and it also opened a Chinese player community, which has a much higher popularity than the rotten "Egg".
Of course, the official is not full of food and spends money to recycle cyberbananas that no one buys.
According to a June 7 report by Forbes, an American business magazine, "Get bananas every three hours, most of them are worth 3 cents, you can get 1 point for selling them, and 1 point each for V and the game development team".
Note that this is a figure that is calculated only for the cheapest banana trades, and there are also indefinite quantities of high-value bananas that are not counted.
In other words, the more people play the game and the more people make deals here, the more the game development team earns. Therefore, the official recycling of bananas is actually a necessary means to extend the life of Banana products (equivalent to some capital markets, "project parties" use buybacks, "burning" and other methods to control inflation).
While you're still struggling with the Steam market for a few pennies, the game development team has fulfilled a lot of people's childhood wishes: everyone gives me a penny and I'll be rich.
The huge number of players and the number of bananas is enough for the development team to make a lot of money.
Even the most common bananas still have more than two million hanging on the Steam market, and you can calculate how much money is behind this.