📈 Has the world gone Bananas?!?
WTF? How has Banana game on Steam achieved so much success when the gameplay is just clicking on a banana? It's not a game, it's a business model
In this newsletter:
Top Revenue - Honkai: Star Rail significantly jumps to #2 revenue driven by its Version 2.3 update. Dungeon & Fighter: Origin continues to hold on to #1.
Top Downloads - Top charts are unusually stable from the previous week, but two new games for China came in hot at #1. 吟游战记 (aka Bard’s Tale) is a team battle anime RPG and #2. 魔力宝贝：复兴 (aka Fantasy Chronicles: Revival) is a fantasy ARPG.
Top Steam Revenue - Elden Ring and Erdtree jump to #1 and #2.
Highlight - Banana on Steam achieved over 917K CCU, 86/100 Player Score, and Very Positive reviews... the gameplay involves you clicking on a banana, that's it. What’s the secret?
Top 10 Revenue
Last War: Survival: While everyone talks about Monopoly Go, Last War: Survival has been quietly sitting atop the crowd regularly in the top 5 Worldwide Revenue, generally beating Royal Match and Monopoly Go.
#1 Worldwide: At this point, Dungeon and Fighter: Origin does not seem to be going anywhere, refusing to relinquish its #1 Worldwide Revenue position.
#2 Worldwide: Honkai Star Rail increased revenue from its Version 2.3 update, “Farewell, Penacony,” introducing new characters, missions, and events.
China Drives WW: As you can see from China's top charts, the Chinese market dictates worldwide charts. Dungeon & Fighter: Origin makes most of its money from China, making it the #1 game in the world, and Honkai: Star Rail’s big jump in China pushed it to #2 worldwide as well.
Top 10 Downloads
Overall: The download charts from last week show very little movement. Notably absent from the charts is Honkai: Star Rail, meaning the game’s revenue jump last week wasn’t driven by a big UA push.
#1 China: 吟游战记 (aka Bard’s Tale) is a team battle anime RPG. Currently, it has a crazy low 2.2 app store rating for technical problems, pay-to-win mechanics, poor customer support, balance and gameplay issues, and too many ads.
#2 China: 魔力宝贝：复兴 (aka Fantasy Chronicles: Revival) is a fantasy ARPG with team battle turn-based combat.
Top 10 Steam Revenue
#1 and #2: Elden Ring + Erdtree claimed both top spots for Steam revenue last week.
#6: Chained Together is a 3D co-op puzzle/platformer in which players are connected by a chain, requiring players to cooperate to navigate and solve levels.
Posted below are some interesting thoughts on Erdtree:
Screenshot of Chained Together:
🍌 How has the Banana game on Steam achieved so much success?
At first blush, the Banana game on Steam makes no sense.
However, the numbers and success of the game cannot be denied (SteamCharts, Steambase):
Released April 23, 2024, by developers Pony, Sky, and AestheticSpartan
Hit an all-time peak of 917,272 concurrent players
Steambase Player Score of 86/100
28,527 Reviews as of June 26, 2024 (today)
Players have spent over 250M hours in the game
Given these crazy great game metrics, Banana must be an incredible game, right?
The Gameplay
Players are presented with a banana that they click on.
This is the game. Really. For gameplay, that’s it.
This is after I clicked 1,000 times:
Ok, I don’t get it… what now?
Well, the secret to this game isn’t the game itself. Rather, it's the game’s incentives, business model, and bots (of course).
After about 600 clicks, I checked the inventory button in the upper right-hand corner. From there, I realized that new banana skins had been added to my inventory.
The Business Model
From play-to-earn and crypto games, we know that financial incentives and speculation have driven many games, such as Axie Infinity, to great success (at least for a time).
Here’s how the business model and financial incentives of the Banana game work:
Banana Item Drops: Every 3 to 18 hours, players get a drop in their inventory for a new banana “skin” item. Currently, there are 77 different banana items.
Steam Marketplace: Players can sell their banana items on the Steam Marketplace. Most items may sell for as little as $0.03, but some rarer bananas have sold for hundreds of dollars, and the highest sale was for $1,378.
Item Featuring: Some community items listed for sale also appear directly featured on the Banana game Steam page.
Selling Banana Items:
Selling items on Steam Marketplace is very easy. You just click the items you wish to sell, set a price, and you’re good to go.
While most bananas for sale are listed for $0.03, the highest-priced banana currently offered is listed at $1,700. Other high-priced bananas drop in price very quickly from there.
Bots and Hype
Unfortunately we are currently facing some problems around botting, since the game takes basically 1% to no resources of your PC, people are abusing up to 1000 alternative accounts in order to get Rarer drops or at least drops in bulk.
As with any game that can be automated for gain, we would expect a lot of bots and auto-farming for the game.
The more hype and money generated from this game creates a virtuous cycle of hype compounded by the ease of deploying bots using Blue Stacks or other such services.
Hence, we should carefully interpret the game’s success to actual real players vs. bots.
In Conclusion
I believe there are some potentially valuable lessons from the Banana game for game developers.
Play-to-earn Model: The ability of Banana’s basic gameplay model to achieve the level of traction the game has achieved suggests that play-to-earn can work outside of crypto/NFTs. This game is a hint of new kinds of games in the future, where a major part of the game experience involves financial incentives for players. Some future game developers will figure out how to integrate financial incentives in powerful ways for traditional games.
Speculation & Collection: The success of this game suggests to me that players are looking for ways in which they can speculate on in-game items. In this case, the speculation is financial but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. Further, I believe part of the monetization of the bananas is due to a latent human desire for collection. Both of these human desires (speculation and collection) should be able to be leveraged in more powerful ways in games today.
Banana Community: The way the Banana developers have also developed their community in Discord and leveraged their player base to help design new bananas is a good example of how other game companies could build better relationships with their players.
🦄 FEATURED JOB 🦄
👩💻 ENGINEERING
🍦 PRODUCT & PRODUCTION
🎨 ART
👩 CORPORATE
🗺 DESIGN