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Games like Banana, Egg, and Cats have been gaining a lot of attention lately, mostly because they have been climbing up the Steam charts with staggering numbers of concurrent players. But what exactly are these item farming games and why all the fuss?
What Are Item Farming Games?
Item farming games are simple, even seemingly pointless, games where players generally perform monotonous tasks. What makes these games popular is the fact that every so often you receive items in your Steam inventory. It’s a concept similar toSteam trading cards.
Some popular item-farming games on Steam includeCats,Banana, andEgg. For the most part, they involve little to no effort. They require mindlessly clicking on objects on the screen—and that’s it. The items that you accumulate can be sold or traded on the Steam Community Market and the funds are sent to your Steam Wallet.
There is another reason games like this seem to be so popular right now. Because of their monotonous nature, the high number of players are partially down to botting.
Can You Make Money From Item Farming Games Like Banana?
While it is technically possible to earn a small amount for your Steam Wallet by selling items you’ve amassed in games of this type, the gains are mostly minuscule.
For instance, in Banana, one of the manyfree Steam games, a regular banana sells for 3 cents. Even rarer items such as the Bananogus and the Void Banana sell for just $8.88 and $15.79, respectively. With the game Cats, even some of the rarest items sell for less than $10.
However, the most coveted items could potentially sell for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. The actual number of these items out there in Steam library space is extremely small, though, which means the chances you’ll come by one are slim at best.
So it’s not like you’ll earn a fortune with these games. There’s also a catch: someone has to be willing to buy the items.
Are Item Farming Games a Scam?
Because of the nature of games like this, many people have been referring to them as scams and likened item drops in these games to NFTs. This is because each sale on the Steam Market earns the makers of the game as well as Valve a small percentage of the sale, and the items themselves are just plain images with no intrinsic value.
One of the developers of the game Banana, speaking withPolygon, has dismissed the suggestion that the game is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, or anything to do with cryptocurrency or NFTs.
For the vast majority, the game will likely be a waste of time, if not also a waste of computer resources. If the possibility of getting a rare item to sell for a huge profit excites you, then that may be a reason to play.
Can You Get Banned by “Cheating” at Item Farming Games?
It depends on what the so-calledcheatis. Steam tends to issueVAC bansfor cheating, but these are limited to certain games. It seems unlikely that you will be banned for using an auto-clicker, for instance, to click on a picture of a banana, cat, or egg.
However, given the meteoric surge in popularity these games are seeing and the extraordinary number of concurrent players, there’s no telling whether Valve may decide to take a closer look.
What to Expect From These Games
If you decide to give these games a go, you’ll probably be confronted with a fairly unimpressive object on a monotone field, having to click your mouse to increase a counter.
Know that most of the stuff you collect won’t be worth much and may be difficult to sell. The games are just mindless clickers into which you can pour time and computing resources on the off chance that you may receive something of value.
The vast attention that item farming games are currently receiving means we could be seeing a lot more of them in the near future. Whether their bubble bursts soon remains to be seen, but their popularity shows no sign of waning just yet.
