Rival Stars Horse Racing comes to PC and Mac next Month
New Zealand based games publisher PikPok has announced a desktop version of their popular mobile game Rival Stars Horse Racing.
Rival Stars Horse Racing: Desktop Edition is scheduled to launch on Steam on June 24th 2020 and will be available for Mac and PC. The game’s description claims it has been “graphically enhanced for desktop”, after Rival Stars was originally released on the iOS App Store and Google Play in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Rival Stars Horse Racing boasts over one million installs on Google Play. Comparing the number of reviews on both stores lets us guess at roughly another half million installs on iOS.
The game has caused some confusion among gamers for being available under two entirely different titles: PlayStation’s Phar Lap Horse Racing Challenge is essentially the same game as Rival Stars Horse Racing, albeit with entirely different branding and monetization. The mobile Rival Stars is a free game with in-app purchases, while Phar Lap HRC on console is a 40$ premium title where the content is unlocked by playing rather than paying extra.
Players of the console version have been reporting however, that Phar Lap HRC does not get the regular updates in content and features that mobile players enjoy. I suspect the game’s console port was arranged as a one-off development by an external team.
As a mildly interesting side note: The package name for the Rival Stars app is com.pikpok.hrc.play (source: App Annie). This suggests that “Horse Racing Challenge” was the game’s original title during development, with the Rival Stars brand being created later on.
An FAQ post in the game’s Steam Forums confirms that the desktop version of Rival Stars will be a premium title for about 40$ and will not contain any in-app purchases. While the monetization strategy of Rival Stars desktop mirrors that of Phar Lap HRC, the PikPok team promises ongoing support and updates for both mobile and desktop, which the console version does not seem to be getting.
For more information on the game and its features, I strongly recommend a look at the Steam Page as well as the aforementioned forum post.
Since I vastly prefer premium titles to F2P mechanics and always like reviewing games on PC rather than mobile, this looks like the perfect time to finally give the game a chance myself.
Rival Stars Horse Racing: Desktop Edition will be released on Steam on June 24th 2020. The mobile version is available on Google Play and the iOS App Store.
