People playing Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, a game provided by Kakao Games, complained about the operation of the game and on August 29, engaged in a demonstration with a real horse-drawn carriage. The “carriage demonstration” this day was scheduled to cover 1.4 kilometers from Sampyeong-dong in Seongnam, Gyeonggi to Baekhyeon-dong, where the Kakao Games Pangyo building is located.

Bak Dae-seong, the representative of the Uma Musume: Pretty Derby consumers and one of the demonstration organizers, released a statement including eleven requests in the lobby of the Kakao Games headquarters ahead of the demonstration this day. Over two hundred users signed the statement.

Bak said, “We took action after clearly realizing that the game operators had no understanding of the game and only took a series of measures to increase sales in the short term.” He also said, “Since the apology by Kakao Games was mostly to evade responsibility, most users found it unacceptable.” Bak continued and said, “What we wanted to know most was who was responsible for the problems, but they only told us that they could not say,” and added, “The promises of improvements were not specific, and they only avoided the issues at the heart of the problem.”

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is a game developed by Cygames, a Japanese game maker, and Kakao Games oversees services in South Korea. Racehorses are the motive of the game, in which players raise horse girls and compete against each other in races. The game has become popular, recording a million downloads in July.

But users had raised issues with Kakao Games for event details that were slightly different from the original game provided in Japan and for update schedules that weren’t released to users promptly. Kakao Games apologized twice on August 21 and 24 concerning these matters, but users complained that the apology was lacking.

The Japanese server announced the Champions Meeting, an event where users can perform only when they raise their characters for nearly a month, three weeks before the event. But the South Korean server announced the event only three days before the event, infuriating the users.

Also, unlike in Japan where they provided tickets for the Kitisan Black SSR, a support card regarded as essential for its high performance, for a year, in South Korea, they only provided the tickets for a month prior to the card’s release, which was another factor that triggered the protest. The fact that the game provides less in-game purchases in South Korea compared to Japan was another issue. Due to pouring complaints, the game’s rating on Google Play, which once recorded five, dropped to 1.1.

The game users came up with the idea for a carriage demonstration, sending a horse-drawn carriage to Pangyo, where the Kakao Games building is located. They borrowed the idea from the “truck demonstration” carried out by game users who shared their views with the game industry on the problem of probability-type game items last year. The users took advantage of the characteristics of Uma Musume: Pretty Derby and decided to send a carriage instead of a truck. At 10 p.m. August 23, organizers raised funds for the carriage demonstration in an online community and raised 9,540,418 won in 29 minutes.