"This still does not compare to the kind of audience we would have on Steam": Horses lead says ban virality helped sales "but we're not out of the woods," and he fears "self-censorship" with future games

News and discussion ignited by Steam and the Epic Games Store banning arthouse horror game Horses has boosted sales of the game on stores like GOG, but developer Santa Ragione says this is at best partially offsetting the loss of the platform-defining Steam audience.

At the time of writing, Horses is ranked second under "Bestselling (recently)" games on GOG.

Speaking with The Verge, Santa Ragione cofounder and Horses producer Pietro Righi Riva says "all this attention" has brought some relief. "I'm probably going to be able to give back most of the money [roughly half of $100,000] that I had to borrow," he says of the game's budget. "But we’re not out of the [woods] yet, no."

"Even with all the publicity, all the reporting, all the reviews, everything else" Riva says, "this still does not compare to the kind of audience we would have on Steam."

This was, of course, exactly the problem with Steam banning Horses and then, Santa Ragione said, refusing to budge despite multiple appeals with corrections to offending content. (Well, it was the problem on a financial level for Santa Ragione; the problem on a moral level isn't something I have space for here.) If your PC game isn't on Steam, it's missing by far the biggest chunk of buyers (and promotional tools) on the platform. Getting on Steam isn't a golden ticket to success, obviously, but not getting on Steam is a heavy blow.

Horses has thus far been able to recoup some of its $100,000 development budget without Steam, but there's little doubt that if it had been accepted back on Valve's store – or never banned to begin with – Santa Ragione would be in a much stronger position. The game would be in the center of different conversations, surely, but it would also be in front of a lot more eyes.

Looking ahead, Riva worries that Horses' banning, which has come on the heels of a much wider wave of PC game censorship stoked by payment providers caving to arbitrary demands and reports, will lead to less provocative and interesting games.

"I think there is going to be, in my case, and in other people's case, a certain degree of self-censorship," he said. "It’s terrifying, and it's going to make people make safer and safer games, me included."

In its support for Horses, GOG argued, "We've always believed that players should be able to choose the experiences that speak to them."

Banned horror game Horses now topping GOG's best-seller charts amid censorship controversy, and it's back on Humble even as Steam and Epic refuse to carry it.