Banana Special: Exploring the Potential, Mechanics & Popularity of the Banana Game with/ Joseph Kim

so I I think I would probably disagree a little bit in the sense that I think that you know the the the on the surface level you could look at this game and just say hey it's a stupid game it's all a pyramid scheme and this and that which is probably true but I think the part that and the reason why I covered the banana game for my newsletter is that I felt like there was an important sort of like uh Market data point here and basically an indication of a larger potential trend or theme to [Music] come this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 4:00 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay 2 and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry you come to me today on the day of my daughter's wedding and you want to speak about a banana game you traveled from India where you have a gaming company and you come to me and you have questions about a banana game right guys are we just talking banana game yeah we are we are we are yeah I I love how much prep you guys like to do you know what I'm saying No this for this this specific episode prep by the way because it's yeah I have preps yeah yeah the prep uh yeah oh that's even better oo welcome everyone you know how this this episode is going to be absolutely super serious

because the the intro was done by Felix thank you very much Felix for the Marlon Brando intro welcome and we have a special we have special gu Joseph again thanks man thanks for for for coming because we are today we're gonna record an episode about banana game which happened to be live on Steam for some time and it's all over the place it's it's absolutely weird I saw there's like cucumber games now clones and and some some other [ __ ] I was reading for some some of the steam uh steam comments and I was like oh my God this is so amazing but before we we go there yakob uh why are you so I'm also angry I'm just looking at my settings at autoc clicker o you're cheating with an auto clicker no way no we'll get to it we'll get to it he's cheating he's cheating anyway because he's always playing on the emulator this is this is played natively

on Steam man it's PC game even if it's a game to begin with but but you okay just just start [ __ ] idiot well I mean uh JK You' wrote about it in the newsletter and it was all over the the news recently and not only recently but kind of like what like last month I think it's still all over the news yeah can can someone introduce this properly I mean you you started quite quite well so you can you can you can do it yeah if you want yeah I'm gonna make you an off for you wonder I I knew it I knew it I knew it okay so currently it's still in top 10 Steam games by CCU which uh yeah it's more popular than uh uh yeah for sure it's more popular than me but it's more popular than Apex Legends like really yes yes lot of bots right like I would assume 90% plus maybe 99 yeah yeah sure

yeah uh this is the one and only game where you click and then stuff happens which I don't know why I can't even click Che one click and you fail actually now click on the banana that was updated because before you could click even elsewhere I actually need to click on the banana it's a new one yeah so this is how it looks there's just like a stupid picture of banana nothing really to it it kind of measures fcks per second think and I'll show you how go it's not stupid we we'll get to it if I click on the button on the bottom it goes into their default banana item store uh this is really important for later just keep that in mind we'll cover it in more detail and then you have the settings thing which you can change the resolution and now there's link to the Discord which is by the way [ __ ] huge and then the workshop items where you I

think 160k was it last time I saw it or something like that uh because of the latest up you can now import your own bananas into it uh that's there and what's the the UI is what like Windows scary AF like we can go a little bit bigger or smaller or whatever was there just please go with ugc is very dangerous that's all uh the important update that was done actually last week uh that the game did was the one that actually introduced the saving functionality by the way which the game didn't still have so if I would close the game uh I would start again from zero so now you can actually like the big number on the screen now saves literally that's what was the big update on June 26 in the game and they added the delay button on the ventory because

I guess people are getting too much crap skins so they wanted to get rid of those and then uh yeah the worksh button I talk about and that's pretty much it I think it was the second biggest update to the to the actual thing with the first one being this one where now you need to click once every three hours to get a drop for for once every 18 hours for the rare drop so they this was their like bot prevention kind of mechanism or whatever but basically well yeah wait wait wait wait it's like so this is clicker game you click and then it's like a half half big scam basically there sure okay sure sure sure but like the the introduction of the game right you click on banana number that's the first thing and then in the meantime uh you can get banana skins the ones that you see in here where they are uh that that sometimes

drop into your inventory it's like a gacha it's basically a slot machine in the end but so but why do I click on the on the Bon because there's a chance that you can get the Skins but the problem is stop the problem is that they kept it by hour so it doesn't matter now how much times you even click you just need to need to run it for hours and before you would do stuff like this that you would have these auxiliary tools like uh this one let me get this right and you just leave it here and uh click and that's how it goes and you would leave it overnight and you would do an increase to uh not 100 Mill seconds but one millisecond and uh there we go and this is how you play the game how many people are playing this game oh 300,000 something we'll get to that number yeah yeah I think alltime Peak was over 900,000 CCU yeah more than hell divers

um Yes Yes actually yes uh the main point yeah yeah the main point here's the here's the whole whole thing so alltime PE 890,000 the developer himself already on polygon or Kotaku article don't remember which one admitted that it's 75% B traffic which I think is not 75% it's 99% because the thing is that people can literally have thousands of instances of this game running on the same PC and just leave it going and you get the skins that that's the thing because you see the waves here it's completely unnatural pattern even if I kind of Zoomed In You Don't See like day and night cycles if we would go something like I don't know let's take Club G for instance you see this is how like a normal read on the CCU should should look on the live game people sleep sometimes but here

they don't sleep because Bots don't sleep that's the thing I think it's so much fun that people don't want to sleep of course exactly just want to click on the banana all 24 hours of course for sure so yeah I think saw some comment where somebody was saying like these kind of big uh big kind of you know you see this like this looks like a market share where like Al goes broke and then go up again where somebody's whatever B Farm goes up out of power and then goes immediately back again which is probably happening somewhere here this is not real players at all you don't have these things so yeah it's guys by the way my mic is not set to the right mic does that matter to you guys is my audio coming across okay it's fine don't worry B yeah it's bananas it's Banas so in the end where it leaves us is that we have this community market

where you can sell these skins actually and this is the whole kind of a meat of this whole thing where uh you have different banana kind of a let's say Rarities where if I order it by quantity there's currently 15 million bananas listed for 0.03 us why is this not an nftd why it needs to be an NF exactly and that's the whole point of it why even use these things if you have can have all the shenanigans and all the fun without any blockchain technology so that's there and if we go by uh yeah if we go by Price there's actually the cryptic Nana and Razer banana because there was actually cooperation collaboration with Razer was done on June 23rd where they're giving away this legendary Razer banana every day for 69 days why

not uh and the bananas are where they are they already sold at what 300 this is the no yeah this is the one 320 one sold and then what's there and then one sold for 217 it's like one one banana for for 228 yeah that's it so that that's how it goes to how much do this guy made doing this stupid game a lot a lot I think the mean lot how do you is the calculation As I understood from the Rev use of the game is that when these things sell even the three cents thing it's that he gets one cent the steam store gets the other cents and the third Cent goes to the player so even though he still gets one cent keep in mind how many [ __ ] transactions happen with these how many has happened how many has happened you tell me but there's millions of them yeah I

think there are a lot of transactions but it wasn't clear to me how the economics work out because when I tried to sell a banana for like 10 cents it showed that the buyer pays 12 cents and then I would receive 10 but you would typically think that Val would get 30% right and then the developer would probably take something so it wasn't clear um but yeah I it does yeah I I'm not quite sure on the economics but uh um you'd have to think that there's uh there's uh at least for me it wasn't clear based upon when when I tried it out yeah um as I said like last time I saw it and you see here that most of these things are priced L by three cents just by the granularity of these things you can really cut those sents into lower numbers percentage wise so my guess is is that one sense developer one sense team one sense player that's it what about those like 400 then what about

4 that's there yeah but then like you know I guess that one devop like the cryptic nana I think like the biggest one sold for 1,700 basically June 20th and then it tanked to $500 or something like that so you this is I think the rare one where uh uh but we want to see the volumes of the trans the volumes of the like the transactions where can I see those I think this one at the bottom like it's just very small meme let me stop you right there so Remo Give me the give me the screen if you can mhm uh so don't worry to the story there is a happy mobile ending to the story there's a mobile form there's in the form of a mobile Cinderella Saga don't worry we're going to tie it back

to Mobile so Fel F Mash genius saw this saw an opportunity saw a steam game that was rising and basically he copied this game and he listens to this podcast I'm sure because he executed with a shitload of ads what happens when you first open this game a open ad you click on a button intertial how to get to the main button where you click on the banana you click on the main screen interstitial you choose free mode or Quest interstitial then you see the banana and if you want to leave that screen you see an interstitial again so this game has been DED over 5,000 times in a month which means that according to my estimates Fel F maish has made $722 by being on the

ball and that's the happy ending man I have even a better give me the screen I I'll I'll do fatality let me show you Jesus Christ I mean by the way there's there's another one I just F wait wait wait wait can I just tell you what other games uh F fire maches has made because he's made quite a few there's a lot of them but get this one the last thing that the banana developer basically said that they're now doing a crowdfunding for banana plushies which means that you can pledge $2 today and if they have 60 supporters you will be charged additional $28 for a banana plusy so money M you gonna you know you're gonna make it happen you're gonna donate $2 yeah I'm gonna donate yeah $2 just out the fun but I'm still I'm still kind of I still don't understand like why why is this like 300,000 the CCU it's it's

called for nothing else it's pretty much people are struggling with fomo and they want to get like it's economic principles basically like you know you can see here literally like how the bubble can rise up here to 800k and then yes you just want to click and get the someone an electricity bill from the boat farm and and thought like okay this doesn't make sense so this you know slowly switching off the both farms and starting to understand that those how many are there 15 million bananas where's the marketplace one so yeah it's it's not really sufficient like yeah 15 million banana three and a half million Moana and I don't know even what's there KN Nana like it just it will be just flooded like it's uh very close to axi Infinity just on a much faster scale basically if you remember how their

economy collapsed it it was kind of very very similar so I I think I would probably disagree a little bit in the sense that I think that you know the the the on the surface level you could look at this game and just say hey it's a stupid game it's all a pyramid scheme and this and that which is probably true but I think the part that and the reason why I covered the banana game for my newsletter is that I felt like there was an important sort of like uh Market data point here and basically an indication of a larger potential Trend or theme to come right which is and and for me that was one it it kind of showed that this this play to earn model which uh we found had massive success in the crypto web 3 space for games like axi infinity and things like that where you're providing an economic incentive for players to play games it this was kind of like for me the first example of where some kind of play to earn type of model could potentially exists outside of crypto um so that that was one thing

but then I think the second thing that it indicated to me is that you know when I think of games I generally think of games in terms of a a latent human desire and the manifestation of some kind of latent human desire that exists in people and so when people are clicking on these bananas trying to get these bananas it tells me that I believe that the this notion of speculation and collection is underserved in games today so so while banana game in and of itself is like a stupid completely dumb click thing you know and for me it was more the business model in the highlighting of potentially latent human desires that are probably not being well served in existing mobile games today to me those are the the the big things that you can take away from even something as stupid as this right that like it's got traction for reason is is my point and I

don't think it's it's stupid at all it's just Absolut brilliant simple idea that people like I mean for of course like multiple different reasons yeah even so the way that I think about this is like so what's what's the so what okay so like one is like you could potentially um like if if you're thinking about the world and opportunities as um you know uh different local and Global Maximo like you could take this model here and is there a way of making this better so people are just copying the basic model but what if you had more interesting gameplay and there have been um and I I would you know without calling out the specific games I think there have been a lot of Japanese games that have um better depth um with these kind of cute whether it's bananas or mushrooms or whatever but I think that if you were to make a better game along with this kind of business model that that could potentially dramatically increase the

kind of traction and success that you can get with this kind of game and then I think the other thing for more traditional game developers like myself or others out there in the market would be to then understand okay if speculation is a Thing If potentially play to earn is a thing that can be manifested outside of the crypto web 3 space then how could you potentially build a new game or adapt these kinds of you know latent human desires into an existing game so that that's kind of like how I think about it and and so that's why I was kind of excited about the banana game it's like okay there there's there's something here there's some potential here right yeah and so like like Pokemon go but you can sell the Pokemon yeah and and you know one of the things and it's not to the degree but like I remember when you know Warcraft 3 mod defense of the Ancients it was like very hard to download very hard to like you know get installed um when you when you first play that game you have a lot of of toxic people like

get the [ __ ] out of here you [ __ ] knew it was really like a bad experience but then like you know the the r guys through League of Legends made uh this kind of Hardcore thing better and so but what you knew was that there was some kind of a model there with the the defense of the Ancients mod that was powerful and that's what I would say about this banana game there's something here that's powerful and so then can we casualized and make this a more of a mass Market thing because I think once you do if you do that then you've got something where now you're talking about potentially meaningful business or a meaningful opportunity for a game developer to exploit let me throw a little bit of a torpedo there because there's one thing that's called money and this whole thing in my opinion is covered by the notion that it kind of find the loophole in Steam Market place where these things can multiply and

multiply and kind of live happily ever after in the steam Marketplace itself because the Skins themselves are if I understand correctly they are hitting the lowest denominator for the listing price those three cents you can list them lower you can't list them lower that's right you can you can or can't I don't think you can yeah so you yeah so and the model still works even with that and the problem is that it's if I would run this operation at scale imagine I would have a bot farm and at Le especially in the in the first uh how is it first weeks of the bubble so somewhere there like beginning of June where it was just like 300K I think a lot of people actually made a lot of money on this game the ones like the bot Farmers actually so that's completely okay and I think like it's the typical kind of the like whole for more the the the first

comes like the first kind of first mover's Advantage let's call it like that and these people makes money but regarding the model itself I think in itself it kind of proves that people will react to to stuff like casinos which like that's basic human psychology uh the operational conditioning works perfectly as it used to from' 70s which is if you give a random re schedule people will kind of reinforce their habit much faster than if it's direct reward rather than random reward and then the other thing is that because of this kind of money element it's just attracting more and more audiences because money is involved by itself if we would take all of the money value out of it what do you think that we would be talking about this game now if you cannot get any monetary value out of the Skins itself yeah that's the whole point why would you take away nothing it's a business model right and I'm not saying

side on this argument 100% yeah I don't say a really good argument you don't copy exactly the way that this game monetizes but what what I think you do is you you try to understand okay you know you you've got the notion of like well steam in particular has uh and this was new to me in terms of that Community Market such an easy way to sell item from games right and and you see like you know csgo has always been one of the top games through selling these kind of like skins and things like that so you've got these kinds of markets you know in in the US um fantasy football for example is one of the biggest it's it's not like a digital game but you know fantasy football in term well it is kind of digital but the the the ability to like bet on and speculate is something that I think is is a is I I think this game proves that players would like to do in some form or some way now how you actually me the hard part is how do you actually manifest that in a game to serve that latent

human desire but if you could what I'm saying is like there is the potential like to be able to give players ability to speculate to potentially give players the ability to have an economic incentive for a game to then make that game you know be more attractive um especially if um if what we're seeing from the banana game is an indication of how big that desire is is that that's all I'm saying and yeah again I'm not saying do it do it exactly like the banana game um and uh then the question is how would you do it in Mobile because I don't think you can have this community market on app store or or Google Play yeah I think the um yeah and I the money question yeah yeah yeah yeah there yeah there the money no no I actually had a a call with some some game CEOs and and you know I and they they were more on the PC side I was like guys you guys are lucky because like if I was doing more steam stuff I'd be looking at this a little bit more

carefully figuring out how to leverage this but yeah to your point mate I think it is harder on mobile um I don't think it's impossible on Mob right it's most probably it's not impossible but then you're are going back to that question like uh uh the marketplace is outside of uh of your mobile game on your web and then that's connected to web shops afterwards as well maybe and no I I agree with you it's a little further out on mobile for sure and may maybe not even as as possible but clearly on the Steep side it's it's it's right there the first thing that comes to my mind uh which I want to talk about is just like the only time I've seen a game right now that had a good kind of crypto solution where this kind of latent need that you're talking about would actually be addressed would be night crows which we covered on the podcast I think uh almost a year ago they had a crypto solution how did that go in the indur mode did you follow up on that like because they had a query interesting crypto solution if I understand they were just talking they will implement

the crypto solution did it yeah not never did it we didn't follow but uh at that point and age when we covered they didn't have that but they were proclaiming they will do that that's the thing but yeah I fully agree with the thing that imagine it as basically being in inside the World of Warcraft game where auction house is one of the main kind of game playay drivers there don't get me wrong there's literally portion of the player base I was also like when I was even playing Ultima Online this was like my favorite activity just stand in the marketplace and make a lot of money by selling things and like total Mana refresh potions and stuff like that it's really engaging if you literally run your business inside the game if you can Corner the market if you can like you know interact with the market forces and stuff like that that's definitely there and yeah it's definitely underserved the thing is that the value of these things needs to be assigned by the players therefore you need an engaging game somewhere there behind

that's why we had all those Chinese gold Farmers because the gold had really big value everybody wants to use it to you know craft their gear craft their materials go into dungeons go into raids to challenge content so on so forth so it was a side effect of that whole thing yeah it would probably work perfectly in a steam Marketplace because it's like a closed system where stuff cannot go out actually it can just you know you can buy Steam games out of it if I get it right you cannot just like directly get get rich quick kind of a scheme and therefore yeah it's like one of the unchallenged kind of waters there because all the crypto whatever like all these other Solutions the biggest problem was always the friction which is still to this day Fone is kind of yeah not not really solved to Big degree they also built Community quite quickly uh around this this by the way the game has like super good reviews like no 84% 33k reviews yes also better than hell divers and you know what's the

you know what is the the the most helpful review it says every five likes I put the banana into my ass that's the right there what the [ __ ] this is how you get very turn into that's that's it it's joke yeah yeah yeah yeah I love memes man I can imagine like uh oh why did I I should just use this in in a cooking games as a as a creative maybe just click clicking on a banana Serv make some creatives around this bu I was diing into some like research on this regarding the developer and if I understood correctly he he already did one other game which was kind of similar to this where there was it was some Forest something German word and then you could also sell trees in it or something like that but that

didn't didn't run and this one actually run so this this is not like it's not his first attempt on doing these things actually so this is the second one which actually went viral so that's there but still yeah it's it's more of like a I think it's great in way as as as as Joe Joe said that it will refocus people's attention on the possibility of steam's community Marketplace because they now saw the power of it like what it can do and how it can you know take these giant numbers into it yeah okay fair any any other comments to this absolutely amazing tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking oh but I I could definitely agree like this kind of shows us that they're just endless possibilities of how how to just

try new things even though it's like full of let me ask you guys a question so with what we've seen and what we've learned here what would you guys build how would you plus one the banana game that's a good thing okay uh first things first I would do like the first kind of vector mount Contin I would put on my design would be it would be you wouldn't be able to emulate it with BS that would be the first thing the game play needs to be naturally but why you want to drive you want to drive those team numbers to then get you more attention right like aous those are Indian those exactly that's just grow those are not as sustainable like Indian if the game is good it will grow by itself that's the thing oh Jesus Christ how how many times I've I've heard this we have we have amazing game don't need

this is not your Performance Marketing mobile thing if the game is good and you even Steam games that's okay but why do you build it on B it's like where it's going to going to lead basically and how do you the other thing if you build your plan on virality it will probably fail because you cannot like build for virality yes maybe yeah but that I would do first and then the other one uh there needs to be some kind of actual kind of loop there which probably would be yeah definitely like some kind of power progression or whatever something there yeah pay to win and then just put things that could be it like management games are also kind of good these days like that that's not the problem it's more of a what oh you already have your idea great I know I of course uh but the thing is that the important thing would

be that these bananas or whatever I would rather be more intrigued of how the functionality from the items that are flowing around the marketplace will be done this I think is the key here not that they are skins skins is like just rudimentary first thing that comes up your head imagine that the things would be consumable for instance so they would have a natural outflow of the economy and then the other thing that they would be usable actually so they would have gameplay power and gameplay functionality so this is the key if you can can work around these two conditions within the core game play yeah and so complicated easy stuff do you know you know how we talked about this Supermarket manager simulator just partner with these games and they they will buy the bananas from you directly so they could stock up the the store the shelves done [ __ ] give me the screen yeah yeah I would probably think about it from a theme gameplay and marketing perspective so theme obviously

like I I don't I think I think the big Miss is why aren't we seeing a mushroom version of this game right like you wna mean this if you want ugc with crazy [ __ ] mushrooms the way to go so that that that's what I would do on theme and then two I for the gamep play I think it's got to be more stateful with progression so I would probably add some ways of being able to like upgrade capabilities or um types of mushrooms where there's like you know Pokemon type evolution in your mushroom or banana cool and then merge four I would probably have some notion of because I do think the other thing that's part of speculation is collection and so I would have some way of being able to complete collections to provide a mid and long-term objectives around okay I want these classes of of bananas or mushrooms or whatever so you can complete sets and then gain some advantages and then I

would try to actually um the the way that the drops occur I think is too passive so like if if you were to like if you were to the the the the best you know uh I guess sort of metaphor for like getting something cool is a gsha box right and so um if you were to encapsulate your drop into something a little bit more substantial like a gotcha box or something like that that you get that you know you could do like Clash style you're going to get this and this much time so you really want to bring people back to come in and then open that gotcha box to get their new banana or whatever right so I think that would create a stronger uh retention Loop and then I think on the marketing side I would probably try to build in a little bit more of a pyramid scheme so something like you know referral codes email addresses numbers or whatever have them put in their codes and then just really be able to get some some bonuses and advantages and some kind of economic model to like really

Drive additional posting about you know here's my check out my mushroom or whatever and then posting and things like that and providing bonuses for that but you know I mean I think that the the copies that I've seen just seem lazy to me y like come on guys like PC guys not to dog on a PC guys but come on mobile guys are a little bit more Innovative yeah like yeah am I the only one who's thinking about money though like I made a meme like some banner ads on the bottom like come on uh I think up until the pyramid scheme comment what you said Joe was basically Legend of mushroom if I understand correctly there um maybe maybe uh the the mushroom game I'm thinking about that I would probably like if I were to do this kind of a game which I don't plan on doing I mean we got too much [ __ ] we're we're working on way behind but like there's there's this other ja Japanese mushroom game that I

would totally totally like base my game off of but anyway I'll leave that as exercise for the audience if they want to try and figure out yes yeah before uh before wrapping up do you guys want to take a guess at what fisel FAS Mish most popular game is Jesus F it's really funny he has three other games right so one of the games is the banana clone but he's a single guy developer right but his most popular game is called my favorite Russian car race it's a bunch of ladas and you race them be another meme that we missed I guess was probably another me yeah I love how random this episode was this is great yeah it absolutely amazing no like it's it's as as random as it gets especially on on Steam and and banana trends one last thing regarding this do you really think that steam's going to

keep up with it and just keep it in the top 10 CCU chars forever now why not why not because then then it means that in like five years we're going to have all the CCU charge done like this basically it's probably more of a fat I I don't I don't think this thing stains yeah but you know if somebody does your upgraded solution you you just described it's going to end up exactly the same and and it's going to be more and more and better would Al form yeah for sure but think we're going to talk about this game ever again if I'm really honest I don't know like for me it seems really natural that somebody as you said probably like five to six serious teams are currently working on this iteration of how to actually squeeze more money out of this idea and they're going to end up in the steam chairs anyway because they build it as you said directly like they will take all the bols with them into their economy and they will see like how the chars will do like this and go from the banana Farm into the whatever new mushroom farm yeah

if admon is is important I would probably also put in like a um like a like a progress tracker like you know um you know you know like in Brawl Stars if you win you can win up to like 11 battles and you get rewards along way I put it like mechs ad progress thing you know you watch this many ads then you can get a little reward and you watch like 11 ads that day and you get like a big reward or something like that yeah but on PC on PC or desktop like how what can youal are rewarded but still bers okay who like who who actually who like Google bers or like who's that Google manager do they pay for do they pay for boat traffic uh no they figure that out quite quickly okay well then then you're [ __ ] so I don't know if they are highly incentivized to really crack down on all the Bots from uh word on the street I remember reading this

article fraud team but I don't think that fraud team is super incentivized to root out all frog off yeah I read this article that estimated that 40% of banner clicks on mobile are misclicks like accidental clicks makes complete sense yeah put it on the right yeah right spot just surprise okay uh I guess uh this was the most fun episode for quite a while this conversation bananas guys bananas yeah bananas thanks ja for coming and thanks for listening join the slack um please um comment on our YouTube YouTube channel what did you think about the episode and uh see you see you next time by bye guys [Music]

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