How to Fish hit one million players two days after its $7.99 launch

Dazed Games, a two-person studio based in Skövde, Sweden, released How to Fish on Steam on 20 August 2026 at $7.99. Three days later the pair posted a Steam announcement saying the game had passed a million players in its first two days. It is still selling: on 11 September the game holds 60,671 Steam user reviews, 57,684 of them positive, and sits twelfth on Valve's own weekly global top-sellers chart in its third week there.

The numbers, and where they come from

The million figure is the developers' own. It appeared on 23 August in a Steam announcement headed "1 MILLION FISHERMEN IN 2 DAYS?!?!1?", signed by the studio's two founders, Carl-Vilhelm Johansson and Melvin Olsson. There is no demo and no free-to-play version of How to Fish on Steam, so that count is players who bought the game, most of them during a launch-week promotion the studio set at 38 per cent off.

Valve's own data shows the interest has not collapsed after the first weekend. The Steam charts service recorded a 24-hour peak of 65,179 concurrent players for the game on 11 September, ranking it 44th on Steam by players in game at the moment of that snapshot, more than three weeks after release. On the store's weekly global top-sellers chart it is currently twelfth, down nine places week on week, in its third consecutive week listed. The Steam review score is "Overwhelmingly Positive" at roughly 95 per cent.

Who Dazed Games are

Dazed Games is Melvin Olsson and Carl-Vilhelm Johansson, listed on the studio's site as its two co-founders. They are programmers rather than artists, which is why the game looks the way it does: low-poly models, flat lighting and a handful of shaders doing most of the work. The studio has no publisher. How to Fish is credited to Dazed Games as both developer and publisher.

Their first game was Out of Hand, a local-multiplayer party game about a controllable physics hand, which they put on Steam in the summer of 2023 immediately after graduating. On the Steam page for the follow-up they describe spending the whole of 2024 rebuilding it for online play, then relaunching it as Out of Hand: Deluxe on 19 June 2025 rather than patching a game they assumed nobody remembered.

That game has 47 Steam reviews. It is worth holding the two figures next to each other: 47 reviews for two years of work, and more than 60,000 for the game they shipped fourteen months later.

A year from first post to launch

The public trail for How to Fish starts on 15 August 2025, when the studio posted a clip on its Bluesky account captioned "started working on a fishing game now". Asked in the replies what engine it used, they answered that it was Unity and that the deliberately ugly placeholder assets were standing in until they picked an art style. Over the following months they posted the game's systems arriving one at a time: sharks in August, a casino in September, grilling at the end of that month, melee combat in October, seagulls, then firearms in November.

That is the shape of the finished game. You crash on an island, fish, kill fish, cook fish and sell fish, buy better rods and then guns, fight bosses to unlock the next island, and gamble the proceeds at a roulette table. Steam's own content descriptor for the game reads, in full, "This game includes cartoon violence towards fish and gambling with fish (no real money)". The release-date trailer went up on 13 August 2026, one week before launch.

“WE HIT 1 MILLION FISHERMEN! THANK YOU ALL! Yes, we'll be adding more content! Yes, we'll be fixing bugs!”Carl-Vilhelm Johansson and Melvin Olsson, co-founders of Dazed Games, in a Steam announcement on 23 August 2026

Nine patches in sixteen days

The studio's Steam announcement feed lists patches 1.0.4 through 1.0.12 between 21 August and 4 September. The early ones read like a small team catching up with a player base far larger than the one it planned for. Patch 1.0.4, the day after launch, raised lobbies from the advertised four players to eight. Patch 1.0.5 added private invite-only lobbies and stopped griefers from ending a session the moment they joined. Patch 1.0.10 removed rich text from chat because griefers were exploiting it.

The later patches are platform work. On 1 September the studio announced that How to Fish had been certified Steam Deck Verified and was playable through GeForce Now, and added toggle options for aiming and sprinting. On 4 September it moved save files to Steam Cloud, having spent the previous fortnight fixing save corruption bugs.

What is planned next

In the 4 September post the developers called it "probably the last bugfix patch before starting to work on content updates", and said they had started planning those and would begin work the following week. No content roadmap has been published and no update has been dated.

Consoles and macOS are asked about often enough that the studio answers it in the FAQ on its own site: yes, but with no timing attached. The game is Windows-only today. The same FAQ says the studio is not hiring, not taking interns and not handing out review keys, which is a fair summary of how much capacity two people have while running a game this size.

• Game: How to Fish, developed and published by Dazed Games
• Released: 20 August 2026, Windows only, $7.99
• Players: 1 to 4 as advertised, raised to 8 per lobby on 21 August
• Milestone: one million players announced by the developers on 23 August
• Steam reviews: 60,671 total, 57,684 positive, as of 11 September 2026
• Extras: 28 achievements, 16 languages with full audio, Steam Deck Verified

The studio has not said anything about sales revenue, and no figure beyond the player count has come from them. At $7.99 before the launch discount and platform cut, a million players is the kind of result that funds a small studio for years, but Dazed Games has not put a number on it, and the announcement that started all of this is four lines long.

The release date trailer Dazed Games published on its own YouTube channel a week before launch.