How to Fish vs DAVE THE DIVER: co-op against solo
Contents
The two most visible underwater games on Steam are built in opposite ways: DAVE THE DIVER is a fully single-player adventure, while How to Fish loses half its point without friends. Here are the figures, read on 31 August 2026.
| Item | How to Fish | DAVE THE DIVER |
|---|---|---|
| Release | 20 August 2026 | 28 June 2023 |
| Days on sale as of 31 Aug 2026 | 11 | 1160 |
| Developer | Dazed Games | MINTROCKET |
| Price in Ukraine | 159 UAH | 415 UAH |
| Discount on 31 Aug 2026 | 0 % | 0 % |
| Platforms | Windows only | Windows + macOS |
| Co-op | online, up to 8 players | none at all |
| Achievements | 28 | 43 |
| Reviews (all purchase types) | 44,256 | 161,563 |
| Positive share | 94.90 % | 96.51 % |
| Steam label | Very Positive | Overwhelmingly Positive |
| Players online 20:02 UTC, 31 Aug | 83,028 | 5,073 |
| Ukrainian language | yes | no |
The difference the store page does not advertise
The DAVE THE DIVER feature list on Steam contains no multiplayer entry at all: it lists Single-player, achievements, full controller support, trading cards, Steam Cloud. There is no co-op, online or local. How to Fish is the opposite: Multi-player, Co-op, Online Co-op, and patch 1.0.4 on 21 August raised the lobby to eight players.
So these are not two similar fishing games. They are two different products that happen to share a tag.
Who is bigger right now
By raw review count DAVE THE DIVER leads 3.65x: 161,563 against 44,256. But that is a total over 1160 days against 11.
Per day on sale the picture inverts: How to Fish is at roughly 4,023 reviews per day, DAVE THE DIVER at 139 per day. That is about 29x in favour of the newcomer.
Concurrent players, both read from the Steam Web API within the same minute: 83,028 against 5,073, or 16.4x. This is a snapshot, not a daily average — in a few hours both numbers will differ.
Rating: DAVE THE DIVER is higher
96.51 % against 94.90 %. A 1.6 percentage point gap sounds small, but it moves the game across a label boundary: DAVE THE DIVER shows Overwhelmingly Positive, How to Fish shows Very Positive.
Worth remembering: the three-year-old game has lived through patches, DLC and several sales. The eleven-day-old one has not.
Price
415 UAH against 159 UAH, so DAVE THE DIVER costs 2.61x more. Both were sold at zero discount on 31 August.
DAVE THE DIVER has more achievements
43 against 28, a 1.54x difference. That is not a measure of length, but it does hint at how much content the authors thought worth marking.
What we are not claiming
We did not measure completion time for either game, neither from our own data nor from external aggregators. We did not compare story or art quality: that is not measurable. The Fishing-tag catalogue count for DAVE THE DIVER (50,822) is lower than the global one (161,563) because the catalogue tooltip counts only reviews written in your interface language and only Steam purchases — we deliberately use the global API figures for this comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Does DAVE THE DIVER have co-op?
No. The Steam feature list shows Single-player only — there is neither online nor local co-op.
Which game costs more?
DAVE THE DIVER: 415 UAH against 159 UAH for How to Fish, or 2.61x. Both were at zero discount on 31 August 2026.
Which game is rated higher?
DAVE THE DIVER: 96.51 % positive against 94.90 %. Those are different Steam labels — Overwhelmingly Positive against Very Positive.
Why does How to Fish have fewer reviews?
Because it is younger: 11 days on sale against 1160. Per day How to Fish gathers about 4,023 reviews, DAVE THE DIVER about 139.
Is Ukrainian supported?
In How to Fish yes, with full audio. DAVE THE DIVER does not list it: its Steam page shows 11 languages and Ukrainian is not among them.