Which Umamusume: Pretty Derby does your store actually sell you?

Five apps, one name

Umamusume: Pretty Derby is not a single app. Checked against each country’s storefront on September 3, 2026, the name resolves into five separate products, each with its own publisher and store identifiers. Cygames ships the global build to Steam, the App Store and Google Play, and a separate Japanese build alongside it. Kakao Games handles Korea, Komoe Technology covers Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Shanghai Hode, a bilibili subsidiary, runs the mainland Chinese release[1][2].

Region locks decide which of the five you get. A Steam storefront query carrying a Korean country code returns nothing at all. The global Google Play package answers 404 from Korea, and Apple’s lookup service returns zero results for Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China alike. Readers in those markets will find the global store links dead and a local build alive in their place[3].

None of the five has been left to idle. Korea shipped 5.0.4 on August 31, 2026, Japan shipped 2.30.0 on August 14, the global build reached 1.35.0 on August 28, and China shipped 2.0.3 on September 2. Taiwan is the outlier, still on 2.18.6 from June 27[2][4][5][6][7].

What the award winner asks of you

An award is why the name is circulating again. Umamusume: Pretty Derby won Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards 2025, ahead of Destiny: Rising, Persona 5: The Phantom X, Sonic Rumble and Wuthering Waves[8]. The Steam listing leads its own description with that win[1].

You play the trainer. The store text puts the job plainly: manage a character’s training and her conversations so that she wins the race you are aiming at. Races run up to 18 competitors with live commentary, and a win rolls straight into a staged musical number the game calls a Winning Live[2][9]. A racing broadcast and an idol show share one screen.

The characters carry the names of real racehorses. The Korean listing offers Special Week and Silence Suzuka as examples[2]. To anyone who has never followed racing, those names mean nothing on day one, and the stories written for each character do that work instead.

Scouting runs on two tracks. The global description says you scout featured trainees and supporters, meaning the characters you raise and the cards that help you raise them[4]. Building one runner properly pulls at both, and a game with two gacha lines has two budgets rather than one.

Rosters differ by build. The Korean Play listing advertises more than 60 characters while the global listing says more than 20[3][10]. Four extra years of service show up in the marketing copy.

Where the charges sit, and why they move by country

The download is free, and what sits behind it is not the same everywhere. The Korean App Store’s top ten in-app products read: 5,000 jewels at 99,000 won, a daily jewel package at 9,900, 1,500 limited jewels at 20,000, a Premium Pass at 7,500, 7,500 limited jewels at 99,000, a rookie trainer package at 6,000, 1,500 jewels at 30,000, a monthly subscription at 9,700, and two further rookie packages at 30,000 each[2].

The Premium Pass and the monthly subscription are the recurring charges, and the global build’s top ten carries neither. It sells currency and starter bundles: a daily carrot pack at $6.99, 5,000 carrots at $69.99, 2,500 at $33.99[4]. Japan lists a Premium Pass at 800 yen, Taiwan one at NT$190, mainland China one at 40 yuan[5][6][7].

Some products name the gacha outright. Japan sells 1,500 jewels bundled with an SSR exchange ticket for 3,000 yen, and another 1,500 with a three-star ticket at the same price. China sells a three-star debut ticket bundle and a top-rarity debut ticket bundle at 163 yuan each[5][7]. A guaranteed pull, with a price on it.

Rate disclosure splits the same way. For the global build, neither the official policy page nor the Steam listing publishes gacha odds[9][1]. The Korean build does the opposite: its Play listing flags in-app purchases including probability-based items next to the age rating, and Kakao Games repeats the label beside the download buttons on its own site[3][11]. Anyone who plans spending from a published rate table will find one build cooperative and the other silent.

Two more figures belong here. Google Play puts global in-app items between $0.99 and $69.99 apiece, and Korean items between 1,500 and 198,000 won. Advertising runs the other way, with an ads disclosure on the global and Japanese listings and none on the Korean one[10][3].

Eleven gigabytes, one language, and who this suits

Hardware is not the obstacle. Steam’s minimum for the global build is Windows 11, a Core i3-4360 or AMD A8-7650K, 8 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 750Ti or Radeon R7 250X, DirectX 11 and 11 GB of storage, with 1920x1080 and an SSD recommended. Controller support is listed as full[1]. On phones the global app needs iOS 13.2 and weighs 396 MB, while the Korean app needs iOS 13.0 and weighs 838 MB[4][2].

Language is the obstacle. Steam lists English as the only supported language, and the interface, audio and subtitle columns are all English[1]. That storefront offers no second option. The Korean build has its own PC route through a Windows launcher on the Kakao Games site[11].

The first ten hours go mostly to learning names, choosing which runner to carry to a target race, and working out how much of the result comes from training decisions rather than reflexes. Holding premium currency through that stretch is the safer play, since two-track scouting only becomes obvious once support cards start deciding outcomes.

The PC crowd is small. Steam concurrents stood at 7,231 when checked, with a 24-hour peak of 9,464. August 2026 averaged 8,071 and peaked at 14,104. The all-time peak, 87,453, was set long before that[12]. The centre of gravity is on phones.

Store ratings put Korea last of the five: 4.58 from 4,750 ratings in the United States, 4.05 from 97,636 in Japan, 3.74 from 13,267 in Korea, 4.00 from 4,187 in Taiwan, 4.43 from 3,349 in China[4][5][2][6][7]. Steam sits at 93 percent positive across 42,011 reviews[1]. Sample sizes differ enough that the numbers do not line up cleanly, though the ordering holds.

The game suits players who like raising one character over weeks, who enjoy the cadence of a race call, and who want to test a free game before deciding on any purchase. It suits less well anyone who plans spending from a published rate table, anyone put off by an English-only client, and anyone hoping to play alongside a friend in another country. Five builds means five apps and five sets of store identifiers.

If you are starting now, install whichever build your own storefront sells you, keep the premium currency for the first few days, and read what the Premium Pass and the monthly subscription actually grant before committing to either. The open question belongs to the global build: how long its catalogue stays free of a pass or a subscription, and when its gacha rates will be published anywhere outside the client.

Sources

[1] Valve. Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Steam store page, accessed 2026-09-03.

[2] Kakao Games Corp. 우마무스메 프리티 더비. App Store Korea, accessed 2026-09-03.

[3] Kakao Games Corp. 우마무스메 프리티 더비. Google Play Korea, accessed 2026-09-03.

[4] Cygames, Inc. Umamusume: Pretty Derby. App Store United States, accessed 2026-09-03.

[5] Cygames, Inc. ウマ娘 プリティーダービー. App Store Japan, accessed 2026-09-03.

[6] Komoe Technology. 賽馬娘 Pretty Derby. App Store Taiwan, accessed 2026-09-03.

[7] Shanghai Hode Information Technology. 闪耀！优俊少女. App Store China, accessed 2026-09-03.

[8] The Game Awards. Best Mobile Game. 2025 category result, accessed 2026-09-03.

[9] Cygames, Inc. Umamusume: Pretty Derby Official Website. Accessed 2026-09-03.

[10] Cygames, Inc. Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Google Play global, accessed 2026-09-03.

[11] Kakao Games. 우마무스메 프리티 더비 official site. Accessed 2026-09-03.

[12] Steam Charts. Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Accessed 2026-09-03.