How to Fish Hits 10 Million Players in 2 Months, 7 Weeks After Selling 1 Million in 2 Days

How to Fish, the debut co-op physics-fishing game from 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 developers wrote in a short Steam News post on October 12, thanking “the 10 MILLION PLAYERS who played our relaxing little fishing game.” The post, signed by Carl-Vilhelm and Melvin, also lays out what’s next: “We know we’ve been quiet for a bit now but we’re doing stuff behind the scenes, no need to worry. We’ll be working on a bigger content update, porting to consoles and bugfixes in the coming months.” That’s the first word of console versions, though no platforms or dates were named.

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. Steam’s content notice says the game includes “cartoon violence towards fish and gambling with fish (no real money).”

The 1-million-sales-in-two-days mark that kicked off the run was reported by Eurogamer in August. The October 12 post counts players, not sales, and the developers didn’t give an updated sales figure, so the 10M shouldn’t be read as 10 million copies sold. 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 Steam page lists 16 languages with full audio support: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. That’s 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 launching 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 $7.99 price and the wide language support make it an easy co-op pick for a group of mixed-skill friends. More Steam player data is on our Player Counts dashboard.

Correction (October 12, 2026): We originally described Dazed Games as a one-person studio; the game is made by a two-person team, and its language list was wrong.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report