A $5 Fishing Game Where You Shoot the Fish Just Hit 10 Million Players

Most fishing games ask for patience. How to Fish asks whether you brought a gun.

Dazed Games posted on Steam on October 12 that its debut title had crossed 10 million players in under two months. That is players, not copies. The studio did not refresh the sales number in that note. What it already had was loud enough: a million copies in the first two days after the August 20 launch, and a Steam peak that Eurogamer put at 268,101 concurrent. SteamDB has tracked higher spikes since. The game launched at $4.95 on a discount from $7.99, the same week as Mortal Shell 2 and the Modern Warfare 4 beta. Somehow the joke about fishing still won the room.

The pitch is a 1-to-4 player physics fishing sim. You crash a boat into an island, catch fish, sell them, unlock gear, and work island to island through quests and bosses. You can also catch fish with firearms, explosives and Call of Duty-style trick shots, then gamble the in-game money. Steam’s content notice is almost a punchline by itself: cartoon violence toward fish, and gambling with fish, no real money.

Carl-Vilhelm and Melvin, signing the Steam post, said the next few months are a bigger content update, console ports and bug fixes. No platforms, no dates. For a first game from a tiny studio to go from a five-dollar co-op gag to ten million fishermen that fast is the kind of Steam curve people usually invent in Discord. This one has a receipt.