Banned by Steam, $100,000 in the hole, and facing shutdown, graphic horror game dev now dropped by Epic Games Store "roughly 24 hours before launch"

Horses, developer Santa Ragione's very intentionally upsetting horror game about naked, censored humans in horse costumes, has been banned by the Epic Games Store just one day before launch, after Epic said it would "promote and support" the game when it was banned by Steam following a content review by Valve.

Santa Ragione shared the news on Bluesky on the heels of the game's release on GOG, Itch, and Humble for $4.99. "Yesterday, the Epic Games Store decided at the last minute not to distribute the game, after having previously approved a release build," the studio says.

In an updated FAQ on the situation – which also describes the funding hole the studio is in after investing two years and $100,000 into Horses, with the studio now facing "likely" shutdown – the developer says this decision arrived mid-evening on December 1, "roughly 24 hours before launch," giving the team effectively zero time to make any changes that might clear the game for release.

In a statement to IGN, the studio says "Epic's decision comes after the overwhelming support Santa Ragione received last week upon the disclosure of Steam's ban, including the public announcement by Epic's and Steam's competitor GOG that they would promote and support the game.

"We do not know what triggered Epic's sudden decision. Following the announcement of Steam's ban, Horses became highly visible online, with strong support and a small but vocal opposition. It is difficult not to wonder whether this visibility played a greater role in Epic's choice than any newly discovered issue with the game itself."

A content review from Epic and shared by Santa Ragione says the game was found in violation of the Epic Games Store's content guidelines for "inappropriate content" and "hateful or abusive content." Respectively, these cover content that "contains explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior or not appropriately labeled, rated, or age-gated," and "content that promotes abuse and animal abuse."

Additionally, Epic says the IARC (International Age Rating Coalition) returned an AO (Adults Only) rating "when we [Epic] filled out the IARC Questionnaire based on the content that we reviewed." Epic says "the only exception" for AO-rated products, which "cannot be distributed on Epic Games Store," is for "cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology."

Santa Ragione says multiple builds of Horses "had been submitted and reviewed by" Epic in the past two months, "with the final achievements-ready build" approved 18 days ago. These launch-torpedoing issues were evidently unreported until extremely recently.

The strongest evidence of this short notice may be the fact that Horses is still listed on the Epic Games Store at the time of writing, with "coming soon" penciled in for a release date. "An enigmatic first person horror adventure that blurs the line between reality and the darkest corners of your imagination," the Epic-approved description reads.

The studio also dismisses the alleged content violations, reiterating that "the game is a strong critique of violence and abuse in general," affirming that there are no "explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior," and repeating that all nudity is fully censored.

The three-hour game features "only four brief and censored sexual sequences, with two of them happening mainly off camera," according to Santa Ragione. (A previous section flagged by Valve, which originally featured a child riding the shoulders of one of the "horses," has long since been updated to replace the child with an adult.)

Much like Valve, Epic says it reviewed the studio's appeal but stands by its decision to ban the game as-is. Santa Ragione says it's unclear what it would need to change even if it had time to make those changes.

We'll still need to play Horses for ourselves to see the meat of the game, but the rhetoric here – creators openly interrogating difficult themes and disturbing material through graphic art, only to be deplatformed and arbitrarily deemed unacceptable even as legions of suspect porn games enter many of these same game stores without issue – is especially striking in the fallout of the payment processor-led censorship wave that hit PC gaming earlier this year.

Early reviews of Horses are rolling in from multiple respected outlets and writers, and what do you know, it seems it isn't the devil himself after all. It's just really, really weird, and proudly not for everyone. Different horses for different courses, I suppose, but I'd wager that's small reassurance for Santa Ragione as it battles this red tape.

GOG shades Steam in support for horror game banned by Valve: "We've always believed that players should be able to choose the experiences that speak to them."