The developer behind massive Steam hit Banana – an idle game about farming a rotating offering of banana drops – has parted ways with one of its developers after they were allegedly involved in a Bitcoin scam. The game, which is second only to Counter-Strike 2 in concurrent player numbers, is a simple affair but one that has drawn controversy quickly.
If you don’t know exactly how idle games like Banana work, we’ve got a handy explainer to that here. Here are the basics though: you boot up Banana and every three and eighteen hours you’re given a marketplace item. These can then be bought and sold on the Steam marketplace, and their value can range from absolute peanuts to thousands of dollars.
It’s worth noting that while Banana has around 800,000 active Steam players (beating out some of the best PC games ever made) – many of these are likely bots farming for skins to buy and sell.
Now, one of the developers on the project, ‘Theselions,’ seems to have amicably left the Banana team following a YouTube video discussing one of their previous projects. In it, YouTuber ‘TDM_Heyzeus’ claims that Theselions was part of another Steam game with its own marketplace, where an alleged bug accidentally started a bitcoin pump-and-dump before Valve deleted it from the store.
Since then, Theselions moved on to be a part of the Banana team, but now that the developers have gotten wind of their previous project, the two appear to have parted ways.
“As you all have heard by now Theselions used to be involved in a steam market ‘bitcoin’ scam/bug,” Banana developer ‘AestethicSpartan’ writes on Discord. “We did not know about this until recent videos started to point this out and we had a talk almost immediately with the whole team about the situation. We gave him the chance to explain the situation to us and we know he is showing remorse and is sorry about what happened in the past.
“As a result, we still parted ways with him on good terms because we all realized the negative impact from something in his past should not depict him as a scammer or other names people have been calling him. With this, we would also like to ask you all to stop harassing Theselions about it as he is aware of the situation. His inventory has been cleared of any valuable bananas that could concern and/or worry the community. The game is completely owned by ‘Sky’ and myself.”
AestheticSpartan also says there is “no scamming/scam” in Banana, and that the team “cannot wait to turn this game into something bigger and better than just a clicker game.” We’ve reached out to AestethicSpartan over the comments and will update this story if we receive a response.
There are plenty free Steam games to try other than Banana, and even more clicker games if you fancy a way to idle away your time.
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