The two most-played games on Steam today are Counter-Strike 2 and this game where you click a banana

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The idle clicker is also poised to break Baldur's Gate 3's record for concurrent players.

People holding guns approaching large banana
(Image credit: Sky / Valve Software)

Banana is a game where you repeatedly click on a banana, and that's about it. If that sounds dull, it is: I downloaded Banana and clicked the banana for a while, and that's pretty much all there is to do. 

But boy, is Banana popular. Since its launch in April, the free-to-play clicker has been steadily racking up massive player counts.

That's not all. Banana is also threatening to usurp one of the most beloved and popular games of the past year: Baldur's Gate 3. Larian's D&D dating simulator has been camping in a cozy spot on Steam's list of the most played games of all time, with a peak concurrent player count of 875,343. That's only about 16,000 more players than Banana drew today.

So, well, yeah. BG3 is almost certainly gonna get kicked off Steam's top 10 all-timer list by a friggin' banana, and it's probably going to happen soon. Like, tomorrow soon. Well, like my grandfather told me on his deathbed, "There's no shame in being beaten by a banana." Now I finally know what he was talking about.

(Image credit: SteamDB)

And as you may have guessed: yes, despite my earlier dismissiveness, there is indeed more to Banana than just clicking on a banana. If you click long enough (and are pure of heart) eventually another banana will appear, which you can then trade or sell on the Steam market. 

The real carrot in Banana is that very occasionally a rare and more expensive banana will drop, which will make all your clicking worthwhile. I think. I haven't clicked long or hard enough to find out, but maybe I will once Banana has become even more popular than CS2.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.