Horses developer Santa Ragione is still "very likely" done making games despite an uptick in sales seemingly stemming from recent publicity and community support.
Despite being banned on Steam and, mere days prior to launch, on the Epic Games Store too, Horses released on Humble and GOG to generally favorable reviews on December 2 and topped GOG's best-seller charts against all odds. Santa Ragione founder and Horses producer Pietro Righi Riva said recently the game's virality did help sales, but not enough to get the studio "out of the woods," and now, he's going a step further by re-confirming what he said before launch: that Horses is almost certainly the studio's final game.
"The reaction and the attention and the support, and the public participation in supporting and preserving and helping the studio, has made a huge, huge difference compared to whether the game had to be released exclusively outside of Steam and without any public outcry or any public discourse surrounding the game," Riva tells Polygon.
Riva estimates Horses will end up with about 10,000 units sold for its first week, which he says is "great," but still not quite enough to pay back the investors that funded the game after its Steam ban. Ultimately, Riva says "it looks like we will be able to give that money back," but unfortunately the prospect of profits being enough to fund another game are a lot less optimistic.
"The trajectory that we're seeing now, as we discussed before, in sales, it looks like we might be able to pay back the people who have lent us the money and pay off the debt," says Riva.
"But it's unlikely that will give us enough money to actually produce something new at this point — because, keep in mind, because of the whole situation, we had to stop development halfway through the game. And at the same time, Valve not giving us Steam Keys for Saturnalia meant we couldn't sell it through bundles in a way that would have given us the kind of cash flow that we needed to start new projects."
It's not over for Santa Ragione yet, as Riva says there's still a chance an investor will come along and fund the studio's next project, but as it stands now it looks like closure is the most likely outcome, which sucks, because even if it isn't everyone's taste, we need more weird horror games with statements to make, not fewer.
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