Those who have been following Steam lately must have noticed a strange game that has exploded inexplicably.
Since its launch on Steam in April this year, this idle clicker game called "Banana" has been soaring, with a single-day peak of more than 800,000 online, not only beating popular Steam games such as "PUBG", "GTA5" and "Apex", but also surpassing Steam's two most popular kings "CS:GO" and "DOTA2" in some unpopular periods.
Don't look at this game, there are more than 800M, but Gyro Jun seriously suspects that the package that supports its actual operation may only be a few tens of M.
The reason for this is that the gameplay of Banana is about 0: open the game and you'll see a banana on an incredibly simple interface, and the only thing you can do is tap on the banana to increase your points.
The system will feed your Steam inventory with a digital item: a yellow cyber banana (in general, the system feeds it every 3 hours by default) based on the fact that you click on the banana.
Looking at it this way, "Banana" doesn't seem to be unusual. But you must know that Steam is a platform that supports the trading of virtual goods, and once these seemingly useless cyber bananas can be circulated in the market and traded by players, their value will be born out of thin air.
To be reasonable, some bananas are designed to be okay
And the developers of Banana are clearly very good at taking advantage of this and trying to create scarcity.
On the one hand, as the idle time of the game increases, the bananas available to players will become rarer (the default drops rare bananas once every 18 hours), and there will be a chance to obtain extremely rare "rare bananas". On the other hand, the official not only sells rare bananas in the trading market, but also regularly buys back the bananas produced by the game on a large scale from players.
Bananas sold officially in stores
Seeing that it was profitable, a large group of speculators who wanted to make a profit from virtual bananas flocked to Banana, and Banana became a "financial product" that beat the drum and spread the flowers. There have been reports that individual speculators are driving more than 1,000 Banana games at the same time for profit, and more than half of Steam's hundreds of thousands of online players are bots.
The price of some rare bananas has reached thousands of yuan
In fact, Banana is not the first "financial product" to become popular on Steam. Prior to this, similar games such as "Egg" have also attracted the attention of players, but they have not made such a big splash as the former.
However, after Banana has involved more and more players, it inevitably raises questions about the difference between the game's business model and the digital currency represented by Bitcoin. After all, their essence is virtual goods that have no real value.
Soon, someone overseas dug up the news: Theselions, a member of the development team, had been involved in the Steam marketplace bitcoin scam.
In response, the rest of the development team assured the community that Banana is not a scam and that more content is coming soon. "As you've heard, Theselions did participate in Bitcoin scams on the Steam marketplace. We also learned about this recently and immediately met to discuss it. We gave him the opportunity to explain the situation to us, and he showed remorse and was sorry for what had happened in the past. ”
In any case, the official announcement was made quite diligently......
Although the development team has parted ways with Theselions and announced that he has cleared his inventory of "all valuable bananas that could cause concern or concern for the community", the incident has raised concerns about the future of the game.
In the Steam comment section, some players used the "tulip bubble" that occurred in the Netherlands in the 17th century as an example, pointing out the huge hidden dangers in the economic system of "Banana": the tulip, as the national flower of the Netherlands, caused an extraordinary speculative frenzy in the country's flower market 400 years ago, but eventually evolved into the earliest recorded financial bubble event in human history. Now, around Cyberbanana, a similar economic and sociological experiment is being repeated in the game circle.
And more people said that they never expected these bananas to make money from beginning to end, so they just hung up and had fun.
Take Gyro-kun's personal experience as an example, although I have been hanging for more than 60 hours and harvested more than 40 bananas, all bananas are cheap goods worth only 0.03 yuan - the so-called "Heavenly Chosen Banana" that the system has a chance to drop may just be a fishhook given by the government to a very small number of lucky people and used to stir up the Steam trading market, provoke human nature, and incite desires.
At the time of writing, Banana's daily online presence has dropped significantly from its peak (from 800,000 to less than 350,000), and perhaps the uproar will subside once everyone understands its true nature.