CORN, a little cryptic title that's not even exactly new, is now soaring through the Steam charts with a 2,673% player uptick over the past 24 hours. What the hell are we looking at?
CORN came out in October 2024 and struggled to break a 50 concurrent player average until midway through May of 2025, when it surged to an average of over 1,000 concurrent players. It remained there until just about now, when it exploded in popularity out of nowhere once more.
At the time of this writing, CORN is sitting at 20,000 concurrent players. That's a figure way past anything you'd expect from a non-marketed title that released so modestly over one year ago, and one that may be very outdated by the time anyone reads this.
Table of contents
Where does CORN come from, what does CORN play like?
CORN is the brainchild of Team Sneed, an indie studio that uses CORN's Steam page to proudly remind users that they're also responsible for a game called CUCKOLD SIMULATOR: Life as a Beta Male Cuck, which I definitely won't get into here because we're short on time and absolutely no other reason.
CORN, despite its studio's history and a name that the Internet recently chose to represent something much less innocent than this poor cereal, is actually as tame as it gets. You click on a still image of a corncob to see a counter appear above it, and you end up getting more pieces of corn. That's it, or is it?
Is CORN the new Banana?
I apologize to anyone flabbergasted by the apparent lack of sense in the header above. Banana, you see, is the name of another mystifying game, one we've covered extensively in a desperate attempt to explain its mid-2024 extreme surge in popularity. Long story short, it's a game where players just click on a still image of a banana and see a counter go up by one with each click. Not exactly riveting gameplay, making the fact that it once reached 400,000 concurrent players—and still sits as Steam's 8th biggest game, with over 100,000 players—all the more puzzling.
The thing is, it's all about money. Though the Internet is no stranger to joining random bandwagons, the deal with Banana was that the items it provided players were integrated into the Steam marketplace, with the rarest bananas turning up pretty valuable. Corn is but a more evolved version of the same game. So, Steam users aren't looking at corn for fun, but profit, for once. Another possible explanation for the large uptick in player count is the high likelihood that a huge number of bots are already exploiting the opportunity to profit from this "new" trend.
CORN still doesn't have Banana's numbers, but growing to over 20,000 concurrent players in just 24 hours, it might get there soon.
The post What is CORN, Steam’s newest inexplicable hit? appeared first on Destructoid.
