In Umamusume: Pretty Derby, winning the race is only half the show

Crowned best mobile game at The Game Awards 2025, the racing simulator has landed on PC carrying the same character gacha — and the same complaints — that players already had on their phones.

From the track to the stage, with no intermission

The race ends and the winner stays out on the track: she steps up onto a lit stage to sing her own victory, applauded by the same crowd that watched her run seconds earlier. That is how Umamusume: Pretty Derby works. You train girls who carry the name, the build and a dramatized version of the career of real-life racers, and you walk them from daily practice out to the track and, if they win, onto the stage. The cast gathers more than twenty of these runners, each with a voice of her own, from Special Week to Haru Urara, and a single event puts eighteen of them on the track at once, with live commentary that mimics a real sports broadcast.

You set the training: how much rest to give, which skill to push, when to gamble on a bigger event — and that choice, repeated over months, decides whether the runner reaches the season sharp or burnt out. The game comes from Cygames, a Japanese outfit that is both studio and publisher; this listing records the release as June 24, 2025, and the version here runs on Windows only.

The store page files it under sports simulation and allows both solo play and direct online matches against other people, controller support included. It also sits, per Steam's own label, in the free-to-play category — which matters here less for the price, not the subject of this piece, than for what the word tends to charge back: the game carries in-app purchases.

A runner who teaches players not to quit

On Steam, where players hand out their verdicts, approval runs wide, and the voices against it sound like an exception in a sea of praise. If you have ever had a game that keeps pulling you back even after months away, you will recognize the scene one player describes: she started at the mobile launch, dropped it for a long stretch, and came back excited about what she saw going around online. In the same write-up, at 52 hours played, she celebrates finally landing one of the rarest runners in the cast. At the far end of that devotion is a player past 792 hours who still praises the depth of every runner's story, adding that the tier he is chasing lies further ahead — the mark of someone who did not end up there by accident.

The most moved account of the lot is about Haru Urara: writing at 98 hours played, a player says the character taught him to keep trying even when he falls behind, because crossing the line first is sometimes worth less than simply refusing to quit. At the opposite end of tone sits an entry logged at 5 hours, reporting a computer that shut itself off mid-installation and a burnt smell rising out of it — and saying, even so, that he would do the whole thing again.

Not every compliment arrives clean. A player at 1 hour recommends the game but regrets that it feels like the phone version pasted onto a PC with no adjustment at all, granting that it has its merits while admitting it could not hold his attention for long. It is the same complaint, with less patience behind it, that opens the list of players who do not recommend it.

When luck counts for more than training

Among the players who advise against it, much of the grievance never reaches the race. One entry logged at 0 hours played reports that a second data package has to be downloaded after the install, with mandatory videos playing while that happens. Another, at 3 hours, describes blown-out audio and distorted voices — proof, to the writer, of a sloppy conversion from the phone.

Players who reach the heart of the game run into a different disappointment. A Russian-language entry written at 928 hours played says the game holds up as a story and falls apart as a gacha contest. Those who climbed to the top training tier see the flaw from another angle: at 480 hours, one player tells of taking his own runners to the peak and still losing to weaker rivals kitted out with cards that only money buys — doing the training right stopped being enough.

Not every rejection is permanent. A player at 41 hours recalls pitching the game to friends as a lottery with no gameplay in it: you drew the runner, she ran on her own, and all that was left was watching. That was the first attempt, back at launch, and he walked away fast. Returning months later, he found a whole preparation layer tucked in ahead of the race — the same training that players with hundreds of hours call the real game — and he turns around in the middle of his own text.

For players willing to train a runner they don't own

The bargain never changes, and it turns up account after account: months of training poured into one runner, on the bet that race-day luck plays along. It suits players who like a short daily session, who come back each day for a ritual of preparation and watch the same cast grow over months — and players who latch onto one particular runner hard enough to feel her win as their own.

It does not suit anyone who wants to compete without spending more than playing time. The players who pushed a runner to the top training tier spell out the ceiling themselves: you can get there without paying a cent, and weaker rivals will still beat you, because they come with cards that only money buys. It does not suit anyone expecting a version built for a computer either — players arriving from the phone feel they dragged the same screen onto a bigger machine, untouched. What is left, for whoever accepts that, is the race run again, the urge to cheer for one specific runner and the stage that lights up after the win — and that is what this game does better than any spec sheet can put into words.