“We expect to support the game for years to come” – Insights on Rival Stars Horse Racing from PikPok CEO Mario Wynands

Rival Stars Horse Racing is something of a rarity in our niche: it’s a polished game aimed at adult players, that’s generally well received and getting regular content updates. For the game’s five year anniversary, I sat down for a call with PikPok CEO Mario Wynands in order to talk about the game’s history, its position in the horse game market and why it takes different approaches to different platforms. 

Beginnings

Mario Wynands, CEO and co-founder of PikPok

Mario Wynands co-founded the company behind Rival Stars Horse Racing all the way back in 1997 - then under its previous name Sidhe. He’s been the studio’s Chief Executive Officer ever since, through its name change and its shifting focus from console to mobile games. 

“I’ve been following The Mane Quest for a long time”, Mario explains as we make our introductions, “since when we were just starting to talk about Rival Stars Horse Racing, and trying to see what was out there. Your approach to critiquing horse games has been taken into consideration from the beginning.”

PikPok’s original horse racing game: Melbourne Cup Challenge from 2006

PikPok wasn’t a stranger to games with horses in them at the time though: In 2006, the company released Melbourne Cup Challenge – a horse racing game for PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox – and saw a decent success with it. Leading up to 2018, the plan for PikPok’s new horse racing game was to combine forces with Australian publisher TruBlu Entertainment in order to develop and launch a multi-platform project with a bigger scope than PikPok might have been able to finance independently. In March 2019, the game that would later become Rival Stars released on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 under the name Phar Lap - Horse Racing Challenge. A Nintendo Switch release would follow in January 2020. 

“Some of the DNA of Melbourne Cup Challenge got carried over into Phar Lap,” Mario explains. Despite the original multi-platform plans, TruBlu Entertainment and PikPok eventually amicably split up to focus on taking their version of the project down a different path: The publisher kept the rights to the Phar Lap console game and would continue developing it with a different dev team, while PikPok would evolve the foundations of the project into Rival Stars Horse Racing for iOS, Android and eventually PC. 

Shifting Audiences

When Rival Stars Horse Racing first launched on mobile in April 2019, PikPok quickly had to correct some assumptions about their target audience.  

“The game started out being targeted to a combination of people who might be into horse racing, or part of the sports enthusiast audience,” Mario explains, “Our expectation was that we would attract an audience composed mainly of competitive younger males.” What Mario calls horse lifestyle enthusiasts – i.e. us horse nerds – were considered a tertiary audience. These expectations were based on PikPok’s learnings from Melbourne Cup Challenge over a decade prior. 

Within the first twenty-four hours of the game’s soft launch however, the team saw a drastic imbalance of who actually engaged most enthusiastically with the game. 

“We had people setting up instagram pages and using the game as a vehicle for roleplaying,” Mario shares, delighted. “We saw people sharing their screenshots and creating their own backstories. At that point we had about five months until the hard launch and we realised we had a lot work to do. There was obviously more demand from that potential audience there, that we needed to cater towards.”

Racing gameplay has been at the core of the RSHR experience from the start…

…while many of its cozier, horse lifestyle focused features were added over time.

Receiving coverage from horse game commenters such as The Mane Quest itself or YouTube creators like Abigail Pinehaven further demonstrated to the team where the enthusiasm for this type of game was coming from, and at the same time advertised the game even more towards the horse-loving section of the audience that PikPok has since explicitly catered to. 

PikPok’s swift reaction to the demands of different audiences let them diversify their player base. “We now have a roughly fifty-fifty split between male and female users for Rival Stars – and they are generally adult gamers,” Mario says, and adds that he believes their audience might have stayed predominantly male if the game’s further development had exclusively focused on racing. 

There are differences between how the target groups engage with the game’s features. “Broadly speaking, male users engage more with the competitive aspects of the game, while female users spend more time with horse care and breeding, for example. It’s a little bit cliché and it not universal, of course, but that’s typically what we see.”

Satisfying these different audiences is an ongoing balancing act for the development team: “You can never sate quite everybody,” Mario adds. “It’s a challenge to keep your arms around that whole audience and trying to make everybody happy.”

This whole process – realizing that your game appeals to a niche audience you didn’t expect, pivoting to satisfy that audience and being successful in doing so – perhaps sounds like the obvious choice in retrospect. The strategy has obviously worked out well for PikPok. But I find it important to note that paying attention to such things and reacting to them with shifts in strategy is not self-evident. We’ve also seen horse-loving communities spring up around games and be completely ignored by the developers of those titles, rather than being engaged with in further updates – the equestrian community around Red Dead Redemption 2 comes to mind as an example, though the games are of course not quite comparable in scope. 

Platforms and Update Schedules

Between Phar Lap Horse Racing Challenge, Rival Stars Horse Racing the free to play mobile game and Rival Stars Horse Racing the premium PC game, players on different platforms are getting quite different experiences. 

This current situation is particularly frustrating for console players: With Phar Lap, they have a version of the game, but due to Rival Stars’ many regular updates on PC and mobile over the past five years, that version lacks many of the features that the horse enthusiast audience is particularly interested in, such as the cute foals and free riding in the country side, as well as additional disciplines and horse breeds. 

Launching Rival Stars on console as its own new and updated product managed directly by PikPok isn’t entirely unfeasible, but it would require careful consideration and further negotiation with the former publisher, due to agreed-upon distribution rights. “I wouldn’t wait for it, but it’s not impossible,” Mario summarises.

The mobile version tends to get updates earlier and more often…

…while PC players wait a bit longer for the finished features.

But even the two versions of Rival Stars that are managed and maintained by PikPok itself have noticeable differences: As a PC player I am infinitely grateful for the “pay once” option, even though the ~40$ price tag is high for our niche. A limitation that PC players have to deal with in return is that updates generally come to mobile first, and are only added to the Desktop Edition with several months’ delay. 

A ploy to draw more players towards the mobile version? Not quite: 

“The mobile version of Rival Stars has exponentially more audience and revenue,” Mario explains in our call. “Imagine ten times the scale of daily players and ten times the scale of daily revenue. That isn’t to say that the Steam version isn’t successful or meaningful to us, it’s just that the mobile version is doing that much better.”

Feeding the hungriest subset of the audience is not the only reason for the delayed release schedule either though: “There is work that needs to be done when porting to the PC interface. We make adjustments between the different progression systems, given that one is free-to-play and one is premium. Sometimes we want to wait with that until the whole system is complete. We understand it can be frustrating players who are predominantly or exclusively on the Steam version, but hopefully we’ve demonstrated our commitment over time that we’ll continue to support and update.”

“So actually the PC players are the lucky ones because mobile users test things early, but we get the features once they’re polished and functional?” I tease in response. “I wouldn’t quite put it like that,” Mario laughs, then adds: “But we can say that the fastest way for us to deliver quality and meaningful features is to try them on a larger audience. Releasing on mobile allows us to test features and make changes, and then port to PC once.”

A brief first glimpse at the upcoming crossbreeding functionality.

As to what some of those updates in the near future will look like, Mario tells The Mane Quest that some fundamental changes are scheduled for the mobile version of Rival Stars soon. Updates to control systems, scoring, balance and economy are planned for 2024. 

“Breeding is about to become more complicated, specifically cross-breeding between different horse breeds,” Mario says. Different horse breeds – the Selle Français and the Arabian to begin with – have only just made it to the Desktop Edition at the time of writing. The latest new breed, the American Quarter Horse, nowadays known and widespread for many purposes, but originally named for being the fastest horse to run a quarter mile, is being added to mobile as part of the 5 Year Anniversary update 

“The PC version will continue catching up,” Mario adds, “with a three to six months delay behind mobile.” 

The near future will also see more focused bug fixing efforts and improvements to stability, as well as additions regarding team-based events and competitions. “We’ll keep fleshing out the ‘equestrian’ side of the game,” Mario promises.

The Team’s official Anniversary video gives some further insight into the game’s past and future:

Market and Competition

With its realistic-looking visuals, high level of polish and frequent updates, Rival Stars is something of an outlier in the horse game space in several aspects. When I ask what put Rival Stars in this position, Mario begins by explaining that PikPok has created games for various other sports niches before, such as surfing, soccer or rugby. 

PikPok has a variety of sports games in their portfolio - a few even sharing the “Rival Stars” brand.

“If you target a small niche audience, a hobbyist audience,” Mario says, “and you bring a certain level of authenticity, that’s usually well received. The audience will give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Rival Stars has had that authenticity and quality from the start, he explains. 

“We were playing to the audience that we knew was there, in terms of them being adults”, he goes on. “It was clear to us early on that people were saying ‘oh, this is a horse game and it doesn’t treat us like children’.”

But Rival Stars also knows its place in the market and its own scope. 

“We’re staying true to a vision and not trying to add everything for everybody,” Mario tells TMQ. When it comes to direct competitors, Rival Stars is well established and secure. “Once a product has a dominant position in a market, it’s hard to dislodge. Any new horse racing game would have a lot to catch up on to compete.”

And yet I cannot help but wonder why there aren’t more companies like PikPok making use of the ever-hungry horse game audience in different disciplines. Where’s the Rival Stars-like for Show Jumping, Dressage or Western Stock Horse competitions? 

“We do see competition on multiple sides,” explains Mario, “and we make strategic choices and marketing choices in multiple directions. It’s the quality, authenticity and attention to detail that people find compelling, and in return they give us the space and time to deliver more features and content.”

“Broadly speaking,” Mario continues, “our competitors come from two sides: one is equestrian sports games, such as Equestriad: World Tour and Equestrian The Game, games that deliver the competitive aspects that are very central to our game as well. On the other end of the spectrum are Star Stable Online and The Ranch of Rivershine, that play more to the fantasy, adventure and role-playing side of it. In Rival Stars, people are layering in those elements themselves.” 

Mario calls it a competitive landscape, but remains confident in Rival Stars’ position. “We’re conscious of other games, watching what others are doing and trying to understand what is and isn’t working for them and what we can learn from that.” 

With its addition of Cross Country courses and multiple horse breeds, Rival Stars Horse Racing has already grown quite far beyond its original scope – and much further than I personally expected it to grow when I first played the Desktop Edition around its release in 2020. (Find my review here) That PikPok has managed to stay true to the project’s heart and focus while expanding it so significantly is quite the achievement in my opinion. As a result, I am stoked when Mario goes on to imply that there might be more horse-related things on the horizon for PikPok at some point in the future. 

“We’re increasing our efforts in the genre in general and may invest more into the horse game space,” Mario admits with a mildly cryptic grin. “There’s significant competition, but there is room for PikPok’s approach of quality and authenticity.”

Team and Vision

PikPok employs around 230 people, with their headquarters stationed in Wellington, New Zealand. “About two thirds of the team are strictly development, with the rest making up publishing, support, admin and finance,” Mario describes. PikPok is a multi-project studio, working on multiple games in parallel. “The Rival Stars team consists of about forty people, so that is a significant chunk of our development force. It’s our biggest internal team, and the biggest live-ops team in the company. Some of our other projects have twenty-five to thirty people, but we also have smaller teams of five or six.”

Rival Stars is a top priority among PikPok’s currently live games, but there are multiple projects of comparable scale also in development.

Behind the scenes: PikPok uses Motion Capture technology as the basis of their ingame animations.

A glimpse into the creation of coat and pattern variety.

“Generally,” Mario goes on to add, “Rival Stars Horse Racing is generating enough revenue for the company that if the team wants something, they’ll probably get it.” 

All of this adds up to a promising future for Rival Stars Horse Racing, both on Desktop and on Mobile. 

“We’re expecting to support the game for years to come,” Mario tells me. “We’re planning to add new dimensions and improve the experience. We welcome constructive feedback and ideas for that, and we also always appreciate getting notified about bugs, and things that people are unhappy with.” 

Mario adds his gratitude for fans of the game. “One thing that we love about working on this game is that it’s got such an interactive audience - they provide ideas, criticism, they point out errors,” he says. “We appreciate that interactivity and the patience that the community demonstrates in understanding that game development takes time, and that we’re committed to delivering new features and new content. Having worked across many different games and demographics, I would agree with many others on the team that the horse game fan base is lovely.”