Cygames at 15: Horse Girls, Skyfarers and Japan's Boldest Studio

In the summer of 2025, a Japanese game company's name appeared on one of the most famous horse races in France. Cygames, the studio behind Umamusume: Pretty Derby, had become title sponsor of the Grand Prix de Paris at Longchamp. It was a fitting move for a company whose biggest hit turns real racehorses into anime idols, and a sign of how far it has come from its first card game.

Cygames was founded on 9 May 2011 by internet and advertising group CyberAgent, which still controls it. Led by president Koichi Watanabe from offices in Shibuya, Tokyo, it has produced some of Japan's most profitable mobile games: Rage of Bahamut, Granblue Fantasy, Princess Connect! Re:Dive and Umamusume, plus console hits such as Granblue Fantasy: Relink.

A card game that conquered feature phones

Cygames' first release, Rage of Bahamut, launched on 1 September 2011 on DeNA's Mobage platform. It was a card battle game with lavish fantasy art at a time when most social games looked like spreadsheets. In Japan, people still played it on flip phones and early smartphones through a web browser, and it became one of the platform's biggest earners. An English version through Mobage became a hit in the West too, and the game later inspired an anime series, Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, in 2014.

That first success set the Cygames formula: top-tier art, generous production values and characters that fans want to collect. The company's motto, repeated in its corporate materials, is to create "the best in entertainment".

Granblue Fantasy: the browser game that would not quit

On 10 March 2014, Cygames launched Granblue Fantasy, a turn-based RPG about skyfarers sailing between floating islands. It had a remarkable creative team: art direction by Hideo Minaba, known for his work on Final Fantasy, and music by Nobuo Uematsu, composer of the early Final Fantasy soundtracks.

Granblue was, and is, an unusual product. It runs in a web browser as well as in its mobile apps, it is text-heavy, and it has never chased trendy 3D graphics. Yet more than twelve years later it is still running in Japan, with new story chapters and events, and in March 2026 Cygames gave it a worldwide release beyond its original Japanese service.

Granblue also gave Cygames a lesson in gacha ethics. In January 2016, a player streamed spending around 700,000 yen chasing one limited character, Anchira, and failed to get her. The outcry led Cygames to apologise, offer refunds in in-game currency and introduce a spark system, letting players exchange 300 draws for a character of their choice. It also pushed Japan's industry body to tighten its gacha guidelines. We explain sparks and pity in our pity explainer.

Princesses, cards and an idol detour

Cygames has never been a one-hit studio. Shadowverse, a digital card game, launched worldwide on 17 June 2016 and became one of Asia's biggest esports card games. Its sequel, Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, arrived on 17 June 2025, ten years to the day of the original's launch, and the original's servers closed on 30 June 2026.

Princess Connect! Re:Dive, launched in Japan on 15 February 2018, blended a gacha RPG with fully animated story scenes and got its own TV anime. Its global version, though, closed on 30 April 2023, a reminder that Japanese hits do not always travel.

Cygames also built games for other people. It developed The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls: Starlight Stage for Bandai Namco, one of Japan's most popular rhythm games. Our Bandai Namco mobile story explores that partnership.

Umamusume: the horse girls who saved the year

Then came the game that turned Cygames into a phenomenon. Umamusume: Pretty Derby imagines famous Japanese racehorses as girls with horse ears and tails who train, race and sing on stage after every win. It sounds like a strange pitch, and it took years to reach players: the project was first revealed in 2016, an anime aired in 2018, and the game itself was delayed several times.

When it finally launched in Japan on 24 February 2021, it became one of the biggest mobile releases of the decade there. Players train a "horse girl" through a three-year career, racing in real Japanese races, and the game's affection for horse-racing history won over fans who had never cared about either anime or racing.

Under the cute surface sits a demanding management game. Each run is a balancing act between speed, stamina, power, guts and wits training, mood and injury risk, and the right race schedule. The gacha sells two things: the horse girls themselves and support cards, which shape what each training session gives you. Building a champion means planning a "deck" of support cards like a card game player, which is why Umamusume communities are full of spreadsheets and run guides.

The game reached Korea in 2022, published by Kakao Games, where a dispute over how it was run led frustrated Korean fans to hire protest trucks outside the publisher's offices. And on 26 June 2025, the English-language Umamusume launched worldwide on mobile and Steam. The game is now active across five server regions.

The Cygames of 2026

The company is restless. In January 2026 it launched Cygames AI Studio; in May 2026 it bought Griot Groove, a 3D graphics and visual effects studio; and in September 2026 it announced CygamesEdge, a new label for small and mid-sized games. Its anime production arm, long known as CygamesPictures, was brought directly under CyberAgent in February 2026 and renamed CyPic in April.

That mix tells you where the studio is heading: fewer bets on a single giant gacha game, more experiments across console, PC and anime.

Why it matters

Cygames is the clearest example of a Japanese company that grew up with mobile and refused to stay small. It survived the move from feature phones to smartphones, built a franchise out of a browser game, and turned a niche idea about horse girls into a global property. It also learned, publicly, that players will punish gacha that feels unfair. Few studios have had a better or more painful education in what players will accept.

By the numbers

• 9 May 2011: Cygames founded by CyberAgent
• 10 March 2014: Granblue Fantasy launches in Japan
• 300: draws needed for a spark in Granblue Fantasy
• 24 February 2021: Umamusume launches in Japan
• 26 June 2025: Umamusume launches worldwide, including on Steam
• 5: Umamusume server regions running today

What to play next

For a taste of the Cygames style without gacha, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a full-priced action RPG on PC and PS5. If you want the mobile experience, Umamusume: Pretty Derby is free on mobile and Steam and surprisingly deep as a management game. Card game fans should try Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, and longtime RPG fans may finally want to visit the skies of the original Granblue Fantasy.