Gamers are always looking for the latest game everyone has jumped on, and usually, these titles offer something unique in terms of gameplay or overall immersion. An example of this would be the rise in popularity of Helldivers 2.
A good place to find these emerging titles and get in on the action early is the Steam charts, which tracks the most-played games across the client. The top five most played concurrent titles hardly change, and when it does, it's a representation of the game making a noticeable splash in the gaming community. As I previously stated, when a game makes it into the top five, it usually has something unique about it that has attracted players or has legacy power behind it.
But that isn't 100% of all cases. Sometimes, a game can enter the top five for no apparent reason at all besides players simply choosing to get behind it. An example of that is Banana, developed by Pony, Sky, and AestheticSpark and published by Sky. Banana is a clicker game that involves players just clicking on the banana in the middle of the screen, and a tally starts. It's a free-to-play game that has earned itself more than 775,000 concurrent players at the time of writing, and peaked today for concurrent players at 830,000.
Banana has more concurrent players than DOTA 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, and Elden Ring, with it only losing out to Counter-Strike 2. Banana is a community-driven game where players can submit designs for new bananas via the title's discord. Additionally, every three hours, a player will get a random banana, growing their collection.