Keys and gifts: 5 065 How to Fish copies not bought on Steam

31 August 2026 · 3 min read

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

Steam has a filter most players never touch: reviews can be shown only from people who bought the game on Steam itself. The gap between that number and the overall total shows how many copies arrived another way — as a gift, a key, a giveaway.

For How to Fish that gap turned out to be large.

The numbers

5,065 reviews is 11.6 percent of the whole base. Every ninth person who wrote a review never pressed buy on the store page.

Where such copies come from

Steam files several different cases under this category, and from the outside they cannot be told apart:

• a gift from another player — bought it, sent it to a friend;
• a developer or publisher key — press, streamers, contests;
• a key bought in a third-party shop — legitimate key resellers;
• a giveaway — promos, bundles, social-media giveaways.

The API does not separate those four cases. It says exactly one thing: the copy was activated with a key rather than bought in the Steam store.

What the studio itself says

In the FAQ on its own site, Dazed Games states plainly that it does not give out free keys. So the simplest explanation — the developer scattered keys around — is ruled out by the studio itself.

That leaves player-to-player gifts, third-party key shops and bundles. Which of the three produced the bulk of these 5,065 reviews we have not established — none of our sources shows it.

Why this is interesting at all

The score did not drop. Free copies usually push a rating in some random direction: a player who paid nothing is either more forgiving or more indifferent. Here the difference is tiny — 95.6 percent against 94.8, under a single point. How the game was obtained barely moved the verdict.

Gifting is a signal too. The game costs 7.99 dollars and has co-op. The cheapest way to bring a friend in is to gift them a copy. A high non-Steam-purchase share for a cheap co-op indie looks natural, even though we cannot prove that with numbers.

The playtime sample shows it as well. Among the 600 reviews we used for the hours count, 79 (13.2%) were not from Steam buyers, and 8 (1.3%) carried an explicit received-for-free flag.

What we are not claiming

This is not a copy count. 5,065 is a number of reviews, not keys. How many keys were activated in total, Steam does not publish, and we did not measure any one-review-per-N-copies ratio.

This is not proof of a bundle. We did not find How to Fish in any bundle — but we did not check every storefront either. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence here.