To ensure accuracy in horse portrayals wherever possible, the SSO team has an internal Horse Committee.

“They’re an advisory board of experts on horse related topics,” explains Nika. “As a Product Owner that works with horse releases, I consult them on a regular basis. Also, several people in our company have their own horses or are taking care of horses.”

Nowadays, Star Stable Online boasts over 500 000 monthly active users (MAU). Although it is hard to find reliable data for the actual MAU of other MMORPGs, half a million is an impressive number. Estimates for the genre giants World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV are all in the vicinity of 1-2 million monthly active users. That a game aimed at young girls, which many gamers will never even have heard of, plays in roughly the same league as genre hits like RuneScape (also around 500 000 MAU) and Eve Online (200 000 - 300 000 MAU) will likely come as a surprise to many gamers and industry people alike.

Unlike many games in the MMORPG genre, Star Stable Online is unambiguously and unapologetically feminine. It’s clear from the promotional material that girls are the heroes on Jorvik. The game’s player base is 95% female.

“We are proud to offer a female main character,” Nika says. “But we welcome both girls and boys to Star Stable. Although most of our players are girls, we want to make sure we are inclusive and diverse, so there is a wide range of personalities and character traits within our game.”

“Most of our players are between 8 and 18 years old,” Nika reveals. “The exact average age differs from country to country.”

Nika says she definitely sees unexplored territory in that target audience: “There are not a lot of games for horse enthusiast gamers, and there is untapped potential there. Additionally, there is a lack of diverse non-violent games for tween and teen girls.”



Ongoing Developments

Star Stable Online’s success was not without growing pains, Nika tells me: “We grew very quickly in a short period of time. The game keeps growing bigger and bigger, with new content coming up every week. Recently our biggest challenge is to align the quality of the game across the whole game while still releasing new things.”