How to Fish, the debut co-op physics-fishing game from solo studio Dazed Games, has hit 10 million players on Steam in just under two months, the developer announced on October 12. The milestone lands about seven weeks after the game hit 1 million sales in its first two days.
“10 MILLION FISHERMEN WITHIN 2 MONTHS,” the developer wrote in a short Steam News post on October 12, thanking players and teasing a bigger content update: “We’ve been quiet for a bit now but we’re doing stuff behind the scenes, no need to worry.” Dazed Games is a one-person team, and the game is the studio’s first release.
How to Fish launched on Steam on August 20, 2026, for $4.95 (a 38% launch discount from $7.99) and quickly became one of Steam’s most-played games. Dazed Games is the studio behind the game, and How to Fish was the studio’s debut release, per Eurogamer. It peaked at 268,101 concurrent players, per SteamDB data cited by Eurogamer, and the launch came the same week as Mortal Shell 2, the Modern Warfare 4 beta, and the Wardogs closed beta. The pitch is a 1-4 player physics-based fishing simulator where the goal isn’t just rods: you can also catch fish with firearms, explosives, and trick shots borrowed from the Call of Duty playbook, then gamble your in-game money for higher stakes. There’s no real-money gambling; the cartoon violence is aimed entirely at fish.
The 1-million-sales-in-two-days mark that kicked off the run was reported by Eurogamer in August. The 10-million-players figure, posted this week on the game’s own Steam page, includes anyone who has launched the game since launch, not unique purchases, so the 10M is a cumulative player count rather than a sales number. Either way, the trajectory from a 1-4 player co-op joke game to a 10-million-player hit is the kind of curve that almost never happens on Steam.
The game ships with full English voice and subtitles plus 15 other supported languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese), which is more localization than most indies launch with. System requirements are light: an Intel Core i5-5257U, 8 GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1050 will get you in.
Our read: The honest one is that 10M cumulative players and 1M sales aren’t the same number, and the developer didn’t break out actual sales in the October 12 post. The growth curve is still wild either way: a $4.95 debut-project physics comedy with no marketing to speak of, against Mortal Shell 2 and Modern Warfare 4’s beta launch week. Compare that to Phasmophobia crossing 30 million sales over six years and Project Zomboid peaking at 81,544 players 13 years into Early Access: How to Fish’s 268,101 single-day Steam peak and 10M cumulative figure put it in the same “surprise indie hit” tier without the years of build-up. Dazed Games’ first release launched the same week as the Modern Warfare 4 beta. If you’ve been on the fence, the lower price and the cross-region language support make it an easy co-op pick for a group of mixed-skill friends. Steam player data on the game is updated hourly on our Player Counts dashboard.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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