Free fishing games on Steam: 113 out of 596
Contents
How to Fish costs 159.00 UAH, and the question is there a free version of this comes up every time. So we counted the whole Fishing-tagged Steam catalogue: 113 of 596 games are free, or 19.0 %. The other 483 (81.0 %) are paid.
Free fishing exists, and there is plenty of it. The question is what you get.
The twelve most popular free ones
| # | Game | Reviews | Positive | Release |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fishing Planet | 29,233 | 84 % | 28 Aug 2017 |
| 2 | HoloCure - Save the Fans! | 26,518 | 99 % | 16 Aug 2023 |
| 3 | Brighter Shores | 8,551 | 67 % | 6 Nov 2024 |
| 4 | Russian Fishing 4 | 7,574 | 79 % | 10 Nov 2021 |
| 5 | How Fish Is Made | 4,371 | 95 % | 14 Jan 2022 |
| 6 | World of Sea Battle | 3,363 | 72 % | 21 Oct 2025 |
| 7 | The Big Catch: Tacklebox | 2,864 | 91 % | 7 Jun 2024 |
| 8 | NTE: Neverness to Everness | 2,572 | 83 % | 7 Jul 2026 |
| 9 | Idle Fishing | 1,954 | 82 % | 24 May 2024 |
| 10 | Villagers and Heroes | 1,749 | 58 % | 17 Apr 2014 |
| 11 | Pocket Waifu: Desktop Pet | 1,723 | 93 % | 13 Aug 2024 |
| 12 | Play Together | 1,707 | 74 % | 13 Jan 2025 |
Catalogue snapshot from 31 August 2026, sorted by the review count in the Steam tooltip.
Free games lose to paid ones on both counts
The median review count among free games is 62; among paid games it is 86. Median positive share: 81 % against 83 %. The gap is small, but it points the same way on both metrics — paid fishing games are on average both more popular and slightly better rated.
That is not intuitive. More people download a free game, so you would expect more reviews. In practice most of the 113 free games are very small projects that almost nobody saw.
One game holds a third of the top
The twelve most popular free games have 92,179 reviews between them. 31.7 % of that is Fishing Planet alone. It is also the only entry on the list that has been running for nine years.
If How to Fish were free, its 15,660 reviews would place it third on this list — between HoloCure (26,518) and Brighter Shores (8,551). In eleven days, against nine years for Fishing Planet.
Free does not mean no money
The most popular free fishing game on Steam, Fishing Planet, carries an explicit In-App Purchases feature tag. We confirmed it through the API: its feature list includes Multi-player, MMO, PvP, Co-op and in-app purchases.
How to Fish has no in-app purchases: that tag does not appear anywhere in its 14 listed Steam features. You pay 159.00 UAH once.
We did not check this for the other 112 free games, and we claim nothing either way about them.
Scores in the top twelve range from 58 % to 99 %
The median positive share across the twelve is 82.5 %. HoloCure is highest at 99 %, Villagers and Heroes lowest at 58 %. For comparison, How to Fish sits at 94.90 % on the full API counter, read at 23:02 Kyiv time on 31 August 2026.
What we are not claiming
Free is the price on the Ukrainian storefront at the moment we read it. A game may have been paid before or may become paid later; we did not separate temporary free weekends from permanently free games.
We did not compare content volume. This is an article about price and popularity, not about how many hours each game holds.
Review counts are not global. The Steam card tooltip counts only reviews written in your interface language, and only Steam purchases. The numbers in the table are comparable with each other because they were read the same way.
The ordering is ours. Steam does not sort the catalogue by review count.
Frequently asked questions
How many free fishing games are on Steam?
113 out of 596 in the Fishing-tagged catalogue, or 19.0 %. The other 483 games are paid.
Which free fishing game is the most popular?
Fishing Planet: 29,233 reviews at 84 % positive. It holds 31.7 % of all reviews in the free top twelve.
Do the free games have in-app purchases?
Fishing Planet does — Steam shows the In-App Purchases tag. We did not check the other 112 free games.
Are free games rated worse than paid ones?
Slightly. Median positive share is 81 % against 83 % for paid games, and median review count is 62 against 86.
Where would How to Fish rank among the free games?
Third, with its 15,660 reviews — between HoloCure and Brighter Shores. But it is paid, 159.00 UAH, with no in-app purchases.