Two concurrent players. Two hundred and six reviews. Ninety-five percent positive. The number one new release on Steam.

Banana Drama, a $1.79 indie RTS about commanding monkeys against dinosaurs, launched today and immediately seized the top spot on Steam’s New Releases chart — not through player counts, but through sheer force of review culture. The math is genuinely absurd: over a hundred times more people have written reviews than are currently in-game.

The reviews are the product. “i dont care if this game is a bitcoin miner because it is so damn peak,” writes one player with 1.5 hours logged. Another, at 9.3 hours, delivers this self-assessment: “i like being a strategic monkey it makes me feel like brown napolean.” A third credits the game with dissolving sixteen blood clots through “constant surges of dopamine.”

This is Steam’s budget gaming ecosystem at peak performance. A game priced below a gas station coffee, from developers Dommenuss and Pikachau under publisher artifact design GbR, commands the kind of unhinged devotion usually reserved for once-in-a-generation masterpieces — and it does it with a concurrent audience that could fit in a single Discord voice channel.

The bitcoin miner joke isn’t coming from nowhere. The name “Banana” carries weight on Steam. In 2024, a viral clicker game called Banana drew a record 862,000 concurrent players and sparked widespread suspicion about crypto mining and market manipulation before its developers were forced to address community concerns, according to Journal du Geek. Separately, the FBI’s Seattle Division has investigated malware hidden across seven Steam games targeting cryptocurrency wallets and browser credentials between May 2024 and January 2026, per CryptoNews Australia. Banana Drama’s reviewers are in on the lore — and they’ve decided it doesn’t matter.

At $1.79, the game costs less than the Steam market fee on a mid-tier CS2 skin. The real play here is the performance, and the community is putting on a show.

Sources