One million players in two days, then eight patch notes in a fortnight for How to Fish

Eighth place on the Steam most-played chart currently belongs to a fishing game. That is Valve’s own tally dated September 4, and the same tally records a weekly peak of 104,048 concurrent players[5]. A week earlier it sat fifth[5].

The game is How to Fish, published on Steam on August 20[1][2]. Three days after that, Dazed Games posted an announcement titled “1 MILLION FISHERMEN IN 2 DAYS?!?!1?” whose body ran to a thank-you for passing a million fishermen and two promises, more content and more bug fixes[4].

Eight patch announcements followed over the next fortnight[4]. Every figure below was read on September 5, 2026 from the Steam storefront and from the developer’s own posts.

Catch the fish, kill the fish, sell the fish, buy the gun

Steam describes this as a one to four player physics based fishing simulator. You were drinking and boating, you crashed into a small island, and learning to fish is the way home[3].

The to-do list on the store page carries the tone better than any summary. Catch fish, kill fish, sell fish. Start with no gear and earn your way into better equipment and weapons. Finish quests and beat bosses to unlock islands stocked with more dangerous creatures and better loot. Collect rare variants of every fish. Land trick shots for extra income. Gamble to make more money[3].

Those last two lines set the register. In the screenshots, the island shop hangs pistols, a submachine gun, a combat knife and a stick of dynamite on the same plank wall as the rods and lures. Calling this a fishing game is half accurate.

Steam files it under Action, Casual, Indie and Simulation[2]. The tags players attach most often run Multiplayer, Online Co-Op, Fishing, Co-op, Indie, Shooter, First-Person, Physics, with Psychological Horror sitting oddly in the middle of that list[3]. There are 28 achievements[2].

The store page says four players, the patch notes say eight

Patch 1.0.4, published the day after launch, added support for eight-player lobbies[4]. The store description still says one to four[3]. The seller is the side that has fallen behind here, not the buyer.

Lobby handling kept changing after that. The August 22 patch added an invite-only private lobby option and stopped griefers from ending a session the instant they joined[4]. The August 27 patch stripped rich text out of chat entirely, because griefers were exploiting it[4].

Two things follow from that sequence. This game shipped as a place where strangers mix, and the developers have been tightening that arrangement in public ever since. Anyone starting now is better off in an invite-only lobby.

Voice sits inside the game as well. The September 4 notes record an upgrade of the voice chat library to version 4.3 to clear several bugs[4].

Roulette wheels and slot machines, none of them fed with money

The purchase box holds one button at $7.99[3]. The discount as of September 5 is zero percent, in the United States and in Korea alike[2][3]. The 38 percent launch week discount announced on release day has already ended[4].

Nothing sits below that button. There is no in-app purchase notice on the store page, no downloadable content block, and no DLC field at all in the app record[2][3]. No battle pass, no season pass.

Gambling, however, is built into the islands. The store’s own to-do list tells you to gamble your way to more money[3]. The September 1 patch moved the roulette table on island six because its position made betting awkward[4], and the August 22 patch fixed slot machine skins turning invisible mid-spin at 4K[4].

The developer content notice on Steam pins down what that means: cartoon violence towards fish, and gambling with fish, with no real money involved[3]. Fish and in-game currency are the stakes.

So the wallet opens once and stays shut, which is unusual for a game with a casino in it. Players who would rather not watch a wheel spin at all should still know it is there before they buy.

A 1 GB download, and four days of vanishing save files

The minimum spec is strikingly light: Windows 10 or newer, an Intel Core i5-5257U or Ryzen 3 1200, 8 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 460, and 1 GB of storage[3]. Games covered on this site routinely ask for 60 GB and up. A broadband connection is required[3].

Saving is where the launch got rough. The August 23 patch started checking save files before loading them, the following day’s patch said it hoped to have fixed save corruption, and the September 1 patch added corruption checks plus backups[4]. Steam Cloud only landed on September 4[4]. For the first two weeks after release, a save lived on one machine and nowhere else.

That same September 1 patch carried two more items: Steam Deck Verified status, and playability through GeForce NOW[4]. Platform flags in the app record still return windows true, mac and linux false[2].

Two people, eight fixes, fifteen days

Every announcement ends with the same two signatures, Carl-Vilhelm and Melvin[4]. Dazed Games is both developer and publisher[2], and its site lists this game, Out of Hand Deluxe and a Discord invite[7].

Reading the patches in date order shows what needed urgent attention. Pufferfish and whales were nerfed on August 21, anglerfish health came down on August 27 because it had become annoying, and piranhas were rebalanced with tuna nudged down again on September 4[4]. Difficulty options arrived on August 24: easy mode gives creatures 25 percent less health and halves their damage, hard mode raises both health and damage by 25 percent[4].

The September 4 post calls itself probably the last bugfix patch before content work begins, and says content updates start the following week[4]. It does not say what those updates contain.

The rating box is empty and the language table is full

Sixteen languages are supported and every one of them ships with full audio, English included[3]. That is not a common arrangement for a two-person studio.

Age ratings are another matter. No rating box appears on the store page and the app record returns a required age of 0[2][3]. Ratings from elsewhere do appear in the record: Germany gives it 12 with alcohol, tobacco and fantasy violence descriptors, Brazil gives it 14 for fantasy violence, and Indonesia gives it 18 for online interaction, intoxicants and violence[2]. Steam’s own interactive elements notice lists in-game chat and online interaction[3].

The player verdict is one-sided. As of September 5 the store counts 53,814 reviews with 51,156 positive, labelled Overwhelmingly Positive[6]. English-language reviews alone run 22,152 with 21,254 positive[6]. These are Steam’s own tallies rather than critic scores.

Three kinds of buyer get their money back here. The first wants an hour of loud nonsense with two or three friends in the evening. The second is shopping for something that runs on a weak laptop. The third wants a game that never asks for a second payment.

The other side is just as clear. Mac and console owners have no way in today. Anyone uneasy about mixing with strangers should set up an invite-only lobby first. Players who dislike gambling imagery will meet it on island after island.

Two things are worth doing today: count whether two other people are actually free this evening, and find the invite-only lobby setting before you need it. The open question sits a week out. The announcement promises content updates and stops there, so whether the first one adds islands or weapons is written down nowhere.

Sources

[1] Valve. How to Fish on Steam (Korean storefront). Accessed September 5, 2026.

[2] Valve. Steam app details API, appid 4001890. Accessed September 5, 2026.

[3] Valve. How to Fish on Steam (English storefront). Accessed September 5, 2026.

[4] Dazed Games. How to Fish official Steam announcements. Accessed September 5, 2026.

[5] Valve. Steam most played chart data. Tally dated September 4, 2026, accessed September 5.

[6] Valve. Steam review summary API, appid 4001890. Accessed September 5, 2026.

[7] Dazed Games. Official site. Accessed September 5, 2026.