Umamusume: Pretty Derby currently has more active players on Steam than Persona 5: The Phantom X. The Atlus gacha RPG has been struggling ever since it launched in June. How did a horse girl waifu racing game beat P5X, which is basically a new Persona game?
‘Umamusume’ has more active players than ‘p5x’ on Steam
Back in June, my co-worker Shaun Cichacki predicted that Umamusume: Pretty Derby would totally beat out Persona 5: The Phantom X in a gacha showdown. At the time, I took the comment as sarcasm. I mean, come on, there is no way a game centered around horse girls could beat a brand new Persona game. Right? Oh boy, how incredibly wrong I was!
At the time of writing, Umamusume has significantly more active players on Steam than P5X. According to Steam Database, Pretty Derby has 36,238 users playing the game right now, and has reached 48,266 peak players in the last 24 hours. In comparison, Persona 5: The Phantom X only has 9,639 active players, and only hit a peak of 12,329 players. That is a pretty massive gap between the two games.
Steam reviews also seem to tell a similar story. Currently, Persona 5: The Phantom X has a “Mixed” rating with over 8,312 reviews. Incredibly, 4,318 of those are negative. In contrast, Umamusume: Pretty Derby has a very positive rating with over 13,100 glowing reviews. Finally, the horse girl game is currently the 33rd most popular game on Steam right now. P5X can’t even crack the top 150. So what happened here?
How Horse Girls Beat ‘Persona 5: The Phantom X’
Besides the obvious, the gaming community really likes weird things in 2025. Umamusume checks all those boxes in spades. The horse girl franchise has also been really popular in Japan since 2021. It even has several anime and manga spinoff adaptations, just to give you an idea. However, in 2025, the Umamusume: Pretty Derby gacha has really taken off with an international audience. The game got further exposure when Twitch streamers Ludwig Ahgren and Northernlion recently played the horse girl racing simulator for thousands of their viewers.
Persona 5: The Phantom X, on the other hand, is currently facing a boycott from its North American players. Despite launching to positive reception in June 2025, players quickly turned sour on the Atlus RPG weeks after its release. The first controversy centered around Persona fans not being happy with the quality of the game’s opening ‘Subway Slammer’ villain. After that, many claimed that the Chinese servers were being given much better rewards. The Global server community was also critical of Atlus for not giving them more free pulls for the game’s opening premium banners. All of this resulted in players boycotting the game.
P5X is also currently facing a review bomb campaign, which explains its current Mixed rating on Steam. While it’s hard to say how many active players Phantom X actually has (as it’s on multiple platforms), its player base on Steam has dwindled substantially. And at the time of writing, Umamusume is a much more popular gacha game. And as a massive Persona fan, that’s just a bit mind-blowing to me.
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