How to Fish ranks 9th of 596 fishing games on Steam

31 August 2026 · 4 min read

GameMapa editorial · how we check facts
Checked: Claude (AI) — fact-checked against the Ukrainian original; not proofread by a native speaker

We pulled the entire Steam catalogue under the Fishing tag — 596 games — and worked out where How to Fish sits in it. Short answer: ninth by review count. But the number carries three caveats, and we lead with them, because without them the table misleads.

What we actually measured

1. The review count in the catalogue is not the global one. In search results Steam shows the number of reviews written in your interface language and from Steam purchases only. We checked this separately: the English catalogue showed 15,660, while the API with language=english&purchase_type=steam returned 15,559 — a gap of 101 reviews, or 0.6%, which is search-index lag. The global review count for How to Fish at the same moment was 43,902.
2. This ranking is ours, not Steam’s. The sort_by=Reviews_DESC parameter sorts by review score, not by count. We took all 596 rows and re-sorted them ourselves by review count.
3. 596 is what this query returned, not every fishing game on Steam. Tags are applied by players, and a game without the Fishing tag never enters this list.

Top 12 by review count

The gap at the top is enormous: Stardew Valley has 25 times more reviews than How to Fish, and nearly eight times more than second place. It is a 2016 game — it has been collecting that audience for a decade.

But within its own year, How to Fish is first

Among the 104 fishing games released in 2026, How to Fish leads by a wide margin: 15,660 against 3,382 for The Quinfall in second place. That is 4.63 times more. The game accounts for 31.9% of all reviews in the 2026 fishing cohort.

Release years in the catalogue: 2026 — 104 games, 2025 — 144, 2024 — 103, 2023 — 68, 2022 and earlier — 44 or fewer per year.

Which tags these games sit next to

Fishing 268 (45.0%) · Casual 222 (37.2%) · Simulation 217 (36.4%) · Adventure 156 (26.2%) · RPG 121 (20.3%) · Exploration 108 (18.1%) · Relaxing 107 (18.0%) · Farming Sim 99 (16.6%) · Life Sim 86 (14.4%) · Indie 86 (14.4%).

There is a trap here too, and we name it: in search rows Steam returns only about the seven most popular tags per game, not the full list. That is why the Fishing tag itself appears on just 268 of 596 — the rest do have it, but it is not in their top seven. So these percentages mean how often a tag makes the top tags, not how many games carry it.

What we are not claiming

We did not measure sales, revenue or player counts for other games — Steam does not publish them, and we do not use third-party estimates. Review count is a proxy for popularity, and it is systematically low for older games (reviews were written less often back then) and high for games that ask for a review from inside the game. Release dates are as listed in the Steam catalogue.