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How to Fish has become enormous on Steam: one million fishermen in two days and nearly 60,000 reviews
How to Fish launched as a $7.99 physics-based fishing game. A few weeks later, it looks more like one of Steam's strangest breakout hits of 2026. Dazed Games welcomed one million players in two days, concurrent activity eventually climbed beyond 370,000, and roughly 95% of tens of thousands of user reviews remain positive.
By Kader How to Fish 
The name is technically accurate.
You do fish.
Then How to Fish starts asking some considerably stranger questions, such as whether a gun, an explosive or an unnecessarily elaborate trick shot might improve the value of what you just pulled from the water.
Catch it. Kill it. Sell it. Buy better equipment. Find another island.
That uncomplicated loop has turned into a remarkably large Steam game.
One million fishermen arrived in two days
How to Fish launched on August 20. By August 23, Dazed Games was already celebrating one million players reached within its first two days.
The developer immediately confirmed two things: bugs would keep getting fixed, and additional content would come later.
Player activity showed that this was more than a large number of impulse purchases sitting untouched in Steam libraries.
Tracking services using Steam's public data recorded an all-time concurrent peak above 370,000 players as the viral launch continued expanding.
That is an absurd audience for a small indie game whose central economic loop involves selling fish after finding increasingly unreasonable ways to deal with them.
The reviews stayed remarkably positive
Several weeks after launch, How to Fish is still sitting around 95% positive across close to 60,000 tracked Steam reviews.
That matters because viral co-op games are very good at producing one spectacular weekend. A funny premise gets clipped, streamers pile in, everyone convinces three friends to buy it and the numbers explode.
The harder part is having those people actually like the game afterward.
How to Fish has so far managed both.
Fishing is only the first half of fishing
The Steam description is wonderfully honest about what players spend their time doing.
- Catch fish and other creatures - Kill and sell the catch - Buy better weapons and equipment - Complete quests - Defeat bosses to reach new islands - Hunt rare variants - Perform trick shots for additional money - Gamble earned in-game currency
The violence is cartoonish, but mechanically important. Catching something is not always the end of the interaction.
Players can use melee weapons, firearms and explosives, while particularly elaborate finishes can improve their rewards.
It gives the physics system room to produce exactly the sort of accidents that become much funnier when other people are watching.
Four-player co-op became eight-player co-op almost immediately
There is an odd discrepancy around How to Fish's multiplayer count.
The Steam store description still calls it a one-to-four-player simulator. That was accurate at launch.
Patch 1.0.4 changed it one day later.
Dazed Games officially added support for lobbies of up to eight players on August 21, doubling the maximum group size almost immediately.
Private invite-only sessions followed in the next patch, alongside a stream of fixes for joining, saving, bosses and various ways physics-heavy multiplayer games inevitably discover that players are much more creative than their developers.
Steam Deck and cloud saves arrived during the post-launch sprint
The rapid patch schedule has continued beyond launch weekend.
On September 1, Dazed Games announced Steam Deck Verified status and GeForce NOW support. The same update added stronger save-file checks and automatic backups.
Steam Cloud support arrived with version 1.0.12 on September 4.
The developers described that patch as probably the final bug-fix-focused update before beginning work on content updates.
There is no detailed official roadmap yet. New content is confirmed as a direction, but specific new islands, bosses or fish have not been formally promised.
Now the tiny fishing game has to live with being a huge one
How to Fish currently sells for $7.99 on Steam. Its much cheaper launch-week promotion undoubtedly helped groups take a chance on it.
Price only explains part of the result.
The game also has the exact ingredients Steam has repeatedly turned into breakout co-op hits: a premise understood in seconds, physics capable of generating unscripted disasters, simple progression and enough freedom for every group to manufacture stories worth sharing.
Dazed Games no longer has to persuade people to notice How to Fish.
Its problem now is figuring out what to build for all the people who already did.