We already knew The Weeknd was a gamer. He showed up with a Persona 5 Tae Takemi tattoo a couple weeks back, which immediately told me everything I needed to know about his taste. You don't ink an Atlus character onto your body unless you've put real hours into a JRPG. Now he's telling everyone to go play something much smaller.

The game is called About Fishing, and The Weeknd has been pointing his followers at it. It's an indie title, the kind of thing that survives on word of mouth if it survives at all. There's a demo on Steam right now, enough to get a feel for what the developer is going for. When someone with that kind of reach says go check this out, people actually go check it out.

I haven't spent serious time with About Fishing yet, but the appeal is pretty obvious from a distance. Fishing minigames have been the secret dopamine engine inside massive RPGs for decades. I spent more hours than I want to admit casting lines in Final Fantasy XI back in the early 2000s, sitting in Windurst with a bamboo rod trying to pull up a Moat Carp while my linkshell members were off fighting gods. Ocarina of Time had that perfect little pond. Dark Cloud 2 built an entire side economy around it.

There's a specific kind of brain chemistry that fishing in games taps into. The quiet rhythm of cast, wait, reel. No combat pressure, no dialogue wheels, no inventory management. Just water and patience. When a developer builds an entire game around that loop and strips away everything else, it can become genuinely meditative. The best ones understand that the fishing was never the boring part. It was the break between everything stressful.

I appreciate that The Weeknd is pushing something like this. Steam's new releases queue moves fast. The algorithm pushes whatever's already trending. A small fishing game has almost no chance of breaking through without someone with a massive audience pointing at it and saying, play this.

Celebrity gaming endorsements usually go the other direction. You see big names attached to whatever blockbuster just launched, whatever live-service title has the marketing budget for a partnership. When someone with tens of millions of followers redirects that attention toward something small and strange, it's worth paying attention to.

Nina and I were talking recently about how the gaming audience has fragmented into these hyper-specific niches, and how hard it is for smaller titles to reach the people who'd actually love them. The algorithm doesn't know you want a minimalist fishing game until you've already played one. Discovery still mostly happens through humans telling other humans.

I'm going to grab the About Fishing demo this weekend and give it a real shot. I've been grinding through enough dense RPGs and sports sims lately that something quiet sounds exactly right. If The Weeknd's recommendation gets even a fraction of his audience to try something outside their usual rotation, that's good for indie developers.