AestheticSpartan, one of the developers and co-owners of the recently popular Steam clicker Banana, saidthat the game’s team said goodbye to one of its members due to his possible involvement in Steam fraud. The developer of Banana assures that the team is not involved in fraud, and that the earnings are completely legal.
«As you’ve all heard, Theselions has been involved in a bitcoin scam on the Steam marketplace. We were not aware of this until recent videos started to point this out, and we discussed the situation with the entire team almost immediately. We gave him the opportunity to explain the situation to us, and we know that he shows remorse and regrets what happened in the past».
In just a few days, Banana broke into the Steam top and pushed games such as Dota 2 and PUBG Banana on Steam even for a short time outpaced Counter-Strike 2 and was the first most popular game (now it’s second). Let’s try to figure out how everything works and whether there is any fraud here.
The game is very simple — you need to click with the mouse on a banana. The result is to get as many bananas as possible. The game’s interface consists of a minimalist window with a large banana in the center. You can also change the appearance of the banana (for money) or the screen resolution.
«Banana — is a clicker game in which you click on a banana! In Banana, you click on a banana to get even more bananas! Every 3 and 18 hours you will get a banana», — says the official description
For a certain number of clicks, users will receive bananas to their Steam inventory — in most cases, these are items worth a few cents, but there are also big wins. They can be sold on the Steam Marketplace.
Steam and game producers receive a share of each sale on the virtual market. Valve takes a 5% commission (at least $0.01), the developer also takes a small percentage, the exact amount of which is unknown, but probably the minimum is also $0.01. No banana costs less than $0.03 — this includes the intrinsic value, the share of the trading platform, and the manufacturer’s share.
Bananas have different prices, from a few cents to over $1000 — June 9 was sold «Special golden banana» for $1378.5. However, the smallest lots bring the most profit to the platform and manufacturers. There are 14 products with a minimum price of $0.03, and each of them is sold by the thousands per hour. According to rough estimates, it brings the development team tens of thousands of dollars a day, if not more.
One of the developers described the reason for the game’s popularity for Polygon. According to him, Banana — is real «infinite money crash».
«I believe the reason why this has mostly caught on is because it is a legal endless money scam. Users make money from the free-to-play by selling free virtual items».
The developers admit that Banana has problems with bots — only about a third of all players were real players. Bots are indeed a problem for regular players, as they help botnet players to knock out more valuable items, some of which are very limited. The development team assuresturned to Valve for help with this problem.
«Since the game takes up about 1% of your computer’s resources, people abuse up to 1000 alternative accounts to get rare drops or at least a lot of drops», — says developer Gary.
So, it seems that there really is no fraud, but there is a feature that resembles a pyramid scheme: people buy and sell items that actually have no real value and make money on it. However, you can buy nothing, just selling what you have dropped. Manufacturers and Steam receive a commission from the sale of items. The user pays nothing and has some chance to replenish their Steam account without spending real money.
However, the «slippery» slope question is exactly why people buy such electronic items. However, selling virtual bananas is not much different from trading, for example, weapons skins for Counter-Strike. As with other similar cases, there are unofficial ways to convert virtual money into real money that have nothing to do with Steam or the Banana developers. Some of the danger is that one day all these electronic «assets» may lose value, but this also applies to any such purchases.
Clickers on Telegram are very similar to Banana, including Hamster Kombat, which is popular in Ukraine and beyond. The game gives virtual coins for tapping on the phone screen and completing tasks. It turned out that Hamster Kombat is registered with RU-CENTER Group, one of the largest domain and hosting registrars that is part of the RBC holding (RosBusinessConsulting). Thus, the game can collect data for Russians, make money for them, and hide some other unpleasant surprises.
Sources: Steam, IGN, Polygon, Eurogamer, The Verge, Uazmi, Dev.ua