A game about horses became an unusual black horse in the game industry this year.
Since its launch in 2021, the Girl Racer Pretty Derby has had great success in the Japanese market. According to the data analysis agency Appmagic, the game has generated nearly $1.9 billion in revenues for developers Cygames since its release in 2021. In June this year, the game was localized to Western markets, while landing on the Steam platform, further expanding its influence.
The Girl Racer Pretty Derby is a binary-style game that combines visual novels and sports simulations. The national uniform is entitled ” Shining! Good-looking Girls ” . The greatest feature of the game is the second-in-a-kind treatment of the horses, in which the game players are to be trained as newcomers in the “Tresson School” to guide the full-time horse-racing women in their day-to-day training and winning the games.
Interestingly, this game, which was already small in Japan and even a “fiction”, is now resonating with Western players. According to Appmagic data, in July of this year, developers Cygames earned about $14.8 million in revenues from the game on the Japanese market, followed by the United States market with just over $13.7 million. Indeed, if the major English-language market revenues of Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom were taken into account, Western players were spending more on the game than on the Japanese market.
At Steam, the Girl Racer Pretty Derby rate was as high as 93 per cent, and the overall evaluation was particularly positive. At the same time, online players usually stayed between 25,000 and 40,000, with a peak of over 87,000 in July. It is not easy to have such a large number of users for a game that is not marketed for large-scale marketing. Much of this is due to its viral transmission on social media platforms such as TikTok, and to its good focus on Twitch.
Much of the reason why the Girl Racer Pretty Derby has been able to do so is because it combines a variety of game types, relies on a spraining card mechanism, and multi-wheel game processes are interconnected. When a player completes a specific role ‘ s career model, the game is not reset like the traditional dove game. The role will become a retired horse, and its unique characteristics can be inherited by any horse-racing woman that the player next trains.
“It is ironic that this really reflects the nature of the horse race: the blood is the most important,” said the game economist Philip Black. “The game reinforces this through its culture system, and the names of these second-rate American girls come from real race horses.”
Players can get role and support cards by using the main currency of the game, carrots. These roles and support cards will influence the horse-semmy training programme. The players then use them in the dove-like process of the game: the player chooses a role and its supporting card formation, training through a full race season.
This not only creates a game process that allows the player to return, but also encourages the player to continue his consumption, with a high reliance on the sprained card mechanism. According to Appmagic data, the average per download income (RPD) of the horse-semmy Pretty Derby in Japan was $177.64, compared with $11.68 in markets outside Japan.
By comparing the data with the God of the Oracle, known as the Kryptonian Spacing Card, Appmagic estimates that the Orient main market, RPD, is $45.69 and the Western main market, $24.68.
Jakub Remiar, the design consultant for the game, stated that the horse-semmy upgrade process, like the use of word-coding in role-playing games such as Darkness or the Holy One, was “super-enhanced”. Even if the player acquires the perfect attributes in a training process, the randomness of the game could still lead to the ultimate loss of horse-single.
“This randomness creates a perfect system: every training is essential, but it may still be hampered by randomness, so it is essentially a mechanism for rewarding progress based on the twisting of an egg,” Remya emphasizes. “Similar to the downing of legends in the RPG, the players get those legends with perfect attributes.”
Players can also look for horses from other players to supplement their own gene pool in pursuit of increasingly good attributes. As a result, a large amount of player consumption tends to occur in the middle of the game, which makes “Seima” much more than “a simple role-gathering game,” said Philip Black.
Black notes that the support card and breeding mechanism is that the game becomes “a fierce, repertoire-repeated battle experience between a player and a single horse. To develop the ultimate role, players must “make wise battle choices, support card decisions… and financial investment”, he said.
Beyond the game, the player’s enthusiasm for ” The Horses” extends even to the interest in real horses. The developer, Cygames, had issued a statement to guide fans in their conduct when visiting the stables. The role of the game is based on the historical background of real horse racing and the complex blood transfer system, which together creates a closed circle of high input and consumption by the player.
“Each horse-same is based on a real horse, her role-setting in the game will be based on its current prototype in many ways,” added by the founders of the Race-Semmy Pretty Derby campaign site, GameTora. “It is fascinating to understand such a cold and deep topic. Many of the horse racing players who had no interest in horse racing had finally found themselves watching a horse racing video on YouTube.”
