Key facts
- Cheapest right now
- € Standard · Europe · Gameseal
- Live offers
- 29 offers · 14 stores
Ask for a fishing game and you will be handed four unrelated hobbies wearing the same label. One of them is a patient sport about reading water. One is a spreadsheet with a boat attached. One is a horror game that happens to hand you a net. And one is a chat room where casting a line is the excuse to stay in the lobby for two hours. Picking badly is easy, and it is almost always because nobody said which of the four they meant.
So this is not a ranking. It is the fishing catalogue we actually have listings for on PC, split into those four groups, with the Steam verdict and the live seller price sitting next to every entry. Start with the group, then pick inside it.
Four unrelated hobbies wear the same label
Before any name, work out which of these you are shopping for. Almost every disappointed review of a fishing game is somebody who bought from the wrong row.
| Family | What you actually spend the hours doing | Who ends up keeping it |
|---|---|---|
| Rod simulator | Casting, reading the water, choosing tackle and fighting the fish. Technique is the whole game. | People who fish, or who want a slow hobby with rules to learn. |
| Commercial boat | Running a vessel and a business: quotas, fuel, crew, gear, selling the catch at the right dock. | Management sim players. The fish are inventory, not trophies. |
| Fishing as a hook | The casting is the loop, but the game wrapped around it is horror, cooking or tactics. | People who want a game first and a hobby second. |
| Cosy and social | Short sessions, low stakes, usually with other people in the same lobby. | Anyone after something to do with their hands while talking. |
Rods, lines and a lake: the straight simulators
This is the group that means "fishing game" to people who fish. It is also the group where the price gaps are widest, because most of these have been on sale for years and the seller boards have had time to fill up.
Ultimate Fishing Simulator — the cheap way in
Ultimate Fishing Simulator. Developed by Ultimate Games, and the one to try first if you have never played a fishing sim. It sits at Very Positive on Steam across more than eight thousand reviews with a Metacritic of 70, which is the strongest combination in this group, and it is routinely the cheapest realistic option on the board.
Every figure in the block below already has the seller's own coupon folded in, which is why the order will not always match what a shop shows on its own page.
Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2 — newer, not automatically better
Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2. Silent Bear Studio's sequel. Worth saying plainly: it currently sits at Mixed across roughly two thousand reviews, while the original is Very Positive across four times as many. Newer is not the safe pick here, so read before you pay the difference.
Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour — tournaments and licensed tackle
Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour. Dovetail Games, the studio that has been making this kind of thing longer than anyone else on the list. Very Positive, and built around competitive sessions rather than wandering a lake. A stack of individual lake packs exists on top of it.
Euro Fishing — the old carp and coarse standby
Euro Fishing. Also Dovetail, and the oldest entry here. Mixed on Steam, and honest about being dated, but it is the cheapest ticket into carp and coarse waters and its lake add-ons are still listed separately.
Call of the Wild: The Angler — the open-world one
Call of the Wild: The Angler. From Expansive Worlds, who make theHunter: Call of the Wild, and it uses the same idea: one large map you walk around, not a menu of lakes. It also carries a Mixed score across more than six thousand reviews, which is a lot of opinions to read before committing. Reserve packs for Spain and South Africa are sold on top.
What if you want the boat, not the rod?
Two games in the catalogue treat fishing as an industry rather than a sport, and both come from the same small studio, Misc Games. You do not fight individual fish here; you decide whether the fuel to reach the good ground is worth what the catch will fetch.
Fishing: Barents Sea — trawling the Norwegian coast
Fishing: Barents Sea. You start with a boat you cannot afford to break and work up. Weather, quotas, crew wages and the market price at the dock all argue with each other. There is a King Crab expansion listed separately if you want the pots as well as the nets.
Fishing: North Atlantic — the same job, Nova Scotia
Fishing: North Atlantic. The follow-up moves the fleet to the North Atlantic and adds lobster and scallop work. The separately listed A.F. Theriault expansion is named after a real shipyard, which tells you roughly how much this one cares about accuracy.
When the fishing is the hook and the game is something else
These three sell more copies than everything above combined, and none of them is really a fishing sim. They use the cast as a rhythm and then build a different genre on top of it.
DREDGE — trawling, and something underneath
DREDGE. Black Salt Games. Overwhelmingly Positive across more than forty-seven thousand reviews, which is the best reception of any game on this page. You fish, you sell, you upgrade the boat — and the further out you go after dark, the less the catch looks like fish. There is an Iron Rig expansion and a Pale Reach one on top of it.
The full seller board for it, coupons already applied:
Dave the Diver — dive by day, run a sushi bar by night
Dave the Diver. MINTROCKET. Overwhelmingly Positive across more than a hundred and forty thousand reviews with a Metacritic of 90, so it is the highest-rated thing here by a distance. Half of it is spearfishing a reef that rearranges itself; the other half is a restaurant management game.
Nice Day for Fishing — fishing as a tactics game
Nice Day for Fishing. FusionPlay, and Very Positive. It replaces the reel-in minigame with a turn-based scrap, which sounds like a joke until the run is forty minutes deep and a fish has a counter you did not plan for.
Which of these do you actually play with other people?
The cosy corner is where fishing games have grown fastest, and it is the group where the score tells you least — half the appeal is who else is in the lobby.
WEBFISHING — the lobby is the point
WEBFISHING. Overwhelmingly Positive across more than fifty-seven thousand reviews, from a solo developer. The fishing is deliberately simple; the game is really about hanging around a shared space with other people. It is the single most-reviewed fishing-first game on this page.
Fischer's Fishing Journey — a small, kind one
Fischer's Fishing Journey. Cutefish, and Very Positive across roughly fifteen hundred reviews. Short, warm and cheap, and the one to hand somebody who bounced off a simulator.
Moonglow Bay — a fishing RPG with a town attached
Moonglow Bay. Bunnyhug. Mixed on Steam, and worth being upfront about, but it is doing something none of the others try: a story and a whole coastal town built out of what you catch.
Two newer small ones are also on the shelf and both sit at Very Positive, though only a couple of sellers list each so far: Black Hole Fishing and Fishing Inc. Worth a look if you want something nobody you know has played yet.
Every pick side by side, at whatever the board says right now
The last column is live: it reads the cheapest listing across every seller we track at the moment you load this page, coupon included. It is not a fixed figure and it is not meant to be.
| Game | Family | Steam verdict | Cheapest live listing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ultimate Fishing Simulator | Rod simulator | Very Positive · 8,000+ reviews | € |
| Ultimate Fishing Simulator 2 | Rod simulator | Mixed · 2,000+ reviews | € (with coupon AUGGOC10) |
| Fishing Sim World: Pro Tour | Rod simulator | Very Positive · 900+ reviews | € (with coupon GCKG2AK5N2G) |
| Euro Fishing | Rod simulator | Mixed · 1,400+ reviews | € (with coupon SEAL17CDK) |
| Call of the Wild: The Angler | Rod simulator | Mixed · 6,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| Fishing: Barents Sea | Commercial boat | No Steam score on file | € (with coupon Gocdkeys12) |
| Fishing: North Atlantic | Commercial boat | No Steam score on file | € (with coupon AUGGOC10) |
| DREDGE | Fishing as a hook | Overwhelmingly Positive · 47,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDK14DEAL) |
| Dave the Diver | Fishing as a hook | Overwhelmingly Positive · 140,000+ reviews | € (with coupon Gocdkeys) |
| Nice Day for Fishing | Fishing as a hook | Very Positive · 2,500+ reviews | € (with coupon GCDKGamivo) |
| WEBFISHING | Cosy and social | Overwhelmingly Positive · 57,000+ reviews | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS10) |
| Fischer's Fishing Journey | Cosy and social | Very Positive · 1,500+ reviews | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS10) |
| Moonglow Bay | Cosy and social | Mixed · 670+ reviews | € (with coupon AUGGOC10) |
| Black Hole Fishing | Cosy and social | Very Positive · 500+ reviews | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS10) |
| Fishing Inc | Cosy and social | Very Positive · 1,700+ reviews | € |
So which one do you actually start with?
I have never played a fishing game. Where do I start?
If you want the real hobby, the cheapest safe first step is Ultimate Fishing Simulator: highest rating in its group and the lowest asking price. If you want a good game that happens to involve fishing, start with DREDGE and do not think about it any further.
Does a Mixed score mean I should not buy it?
Not on its own, and this genre is the clearest example. Simulators aimed at real anglers pick up reviews from two audiences at once — the people who wanted a sport and the people who wanted a game — and the score lands in the middle. Read what the complaints are about before treating the number as a verdict.
Are the lake and reserve DLCs worth it?
Only after the base game has held your attention for a few evenings. Fishing Sim World, Euro Fishing and The Angler all sell their waters separately, and buying them up front is the most common way to overspend on this genre. The base games are cheap; the add-on stacks are not.
Grouped rather than ranked, the shortlist is short: DREDGE if you want a game, Ultimate Fishing Simulator if you want the hobby, Fishing: Barents Sea if you want the business, WEBFISHING if you want the company. When you have decided, you can buy DREDGE key or buy Ultimate Fishing Simulator key straight from the full listing, with every seller coupon already applied.
I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, and for the last 14 years I have been making life easier for other gamers. CEO and co-founder of Gocdkeys.
LinkedIn profile More about Luis Abrines
+ 120 Tickets by link