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"

GOG has waded into the drama surrounding Horses, the experimental horror game banned on Steam, by publicly backing its acclaimed indie developer and proclaiming that the company's "proud" to host it.

For some background, Italian developer Santa Ragione has been behind some beloved horror games over the years, including Saturnalia and Mediterranea Inferno, but it recently hit a road bump (or an impenetrable brick wall) when Valve blocked its upcoming game, Horses, from releasing on Steam, easily the biggest PC storefront by a long stretch.

Horses had been in development for over two years and cost $100,000 to make, so Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva said the studio was "likely closing" since the horror title probably wouldn't be able to recoup costs without access to the vast majority of PC players.

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The CD Projekt Red-owned digital platform, GOG, is now trying to make up for the difference. "We're proud to give HORSES a home on GOG, giving players another way to enjoy the game," the storefront tweeted today. "We've always believed that players should be able to choose the experiences that speak to them. To support the Santa Ragione studio in this difficult time, we've decided to launch pre-orders on HORSES today – grab yours and celebrate their creativity!"

Getting banned from Steam is usually a death sentence for smaller studios. Not only are you cut off from the majority of folks looking to buy games, but indie publishers are less likely to finance your projects since the road to profitability is much harder.

As for why Horses was banned, here's Valve's statement to GI.biz in full:

"We reviewed the game back in 2023. At that time, the developer indicated with their release date in Steamworks that they planned to release a few months later. Based on content in the store page, we told the developer we would need to review the build itself. This happens sometimes if content on the store page causes concern that the game itself might not fall within our guidelines. After our team played through the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines. A short while later the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed that extensively and communicated to the developer our final decision that we were not going to ship the game on Steam."

Speaking to RPS, Santa Ragione guessed the ban stemmed from a scene in the 2023 build in which a child asks to ride one of the titular naked humans who are wearing horse faces, which seems like more of a comment on exploitation than anything titillating.

"The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag," the studio told RPS. "We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character."

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