더비 데이즈 (Derby Days)

~ the obit ~

Com2uS opened it on the Korean App Store on 5 January 2012, after quiet testing in Canada, Australia, China and Taiwan, and put it on the global Apple store three weeks later in about ninety countries. It was the company's second social game after Tiny Farm, and it was a horse ranch, where you harvested and raced and mostly spent carrots. Four currencies ran at once: gold out of your buildings, carrots for breeding and training, energy gating how much you could do in a sitting, and cash you could only get by paying.

The Android version reached the Korean open markets that summer and went to number one among free games on T Store in June. By September 2012 the company was announcing three million downloads. Almost all the growth it would ever manage had happened by then: the last archived Google Play listing, from December 2016, still puts the install bracket at one to five million, four years on.

One detail on the store page has aged into comedy. The content rating was Teen, and the reasons listed were violence, blood, suggestive themes and partial nudity. This was a game about grooming ponies and visiting your friend's paddock.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four hundred billion horses ~

You got a horse two ways: buy one, or breed one. 교배, crossbreeding, worked against the shop's stock or against a horse standing on a friend's ranch, and visiting that ranch also paid you in carrots and energy on a daily timer. So the social hook and the money sink were one mechanism, built to feed each other.

The sales number attached to it did not hold still. At the January 2012 launch the press release promised 수천가지, thousands of possible new horses. By late June the figure in circulation was 4천억, four hundred billion distinct foal appearances, and on 30 June the producer, Lee Hyun-su, repeated it in an interview and added that the chance of two identical horses appearing was almost nil.

In the same conversation he said the quiet part. 교배의 규칙이 없었던 것은 아니고, 결과값이 유저분들의 예상보다 너무 다양해서 문제였다. It was not that the breeding had no rules, he said, the problem was that the results came out far more varied than players expected. 의외성의 범위가 너무 넓었다. The range of unpredictability was too wide. The headline number and the design fault were the same number: with four hundred billion outcomes nobody could form an expectation, so the system that was supposed to hook you read as noise instead. He admitted two other things that day, that the racing had originally been too hard and that cramming too much into the launch build had left the client unstable.

~ the ranch next door ~

This one shipped as a single build for everywhere. The Android package has global sitting in the middle of its name, no regional variants were ever archived, the listing supported six languages at once, and every account ran through Com2uS Hub. There is no regional closure to untangle here and no territory that outlived another, which for a Korean mobile title of this vintage is rare enough that it should be said out loud.

It also means the distance is not geographic. The game was installable from Turkey for its whole life. What you could not download was a neighborhood, and a ranch game that pays you for visiting friends needs those friends already standing in it. The player mass sat in Korea and Japan. A global release and a global player base are separate achievements, and this kind of game dies quietly in the space between them.

~ the long quiet before it stopped ~

Version 2.3.7 went out on 4 September 2016 with the patch note "We've fixed up some minor bugs!" Nothing followed it. A hundred and seventy days later, on 21 February 2017, the Korean outlet HungryApp carried the closing date of 23 March, and noted that fresh downloads and the billing had both been switched off at some point before the announcement appeared. Refunds ran from 25 March to 21 April, opening two days after the game was gone.

That article is the whole evidentiary basis for the date, and it deserves saying plainly: no first-party Com2uS notice survives anywhere. The Hive notice board's archive stops in October 2016, every notice path on com2us.com now serves the same empty app shell, and Korean Wikipedia's single footnote points back at the same HungryApp piece. One claim, repeated. What supports it is circumstantial and consistent: the Play listing answers normally through December 2016 and is a 404 by 2021, and the publisher's own arithmetic in that article, 1,905 days from 5 January 2012, checks out exactly. The domain derbydays.com is not evidence of anything, incidentally. It has been registered since 2001, a decade before the game, and was parked keyword furniture the whole time.

Tiny Farm, the sibling this one was built to follow, is still on the App Store.

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