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Valve has upheld its decision to ban the surreal horror game Horses from Steam, despite public outcry after the award-winning indie studio behind the game announced that the ban means the company will be "likely closing."
Speaking to Eurogamer following the reveal of Valve's final decision, Santa Ragione's co-founder Pietro Righi Riva said, "Managing the studio [which is] likely closing, and the grief that comes with it, and also the expectations for the emotional toll [knowing] we would have to go through this and go public with this, that's been very, very stressful."
Santa Ragione is a small studio best known for its surreal stories, such as Mediterranea Inferno, which won Excellence in Narrative at the Independent Games Festival. It's been working on its upcoming release, Horses, for the past two years, claiming to have spent around $100,000 on the project. The studio claims that if Horses fails to sell, the studio could close.
A Steam ban can often be deadly for indie studios, as it is by far the largest platform for PC games. Most small studios choose to release on PC and, if successful, port to other consoles, since this is expensive. Being banned from Steam also means that publishers are less likely to work with you and finance your project.
In an FAQ about the Steam ban, Santa Ragione clarifies that Steam rejected Horses after playing a preview build back in 2023, and claims that Valve did not clearly communicate which parts of the game broke the platform guidelines. A response from Valve reads, "regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor."
The studio says that it believes it is referring to a scene from an earlier build where a clothed child rode on the shoulders of a naked woman. The child character was later changed to be an adult, but Valve has refused to reverse its decision.
Valve's full response, as delivered to GI.biz, reads:
"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."
Valve's story corroborates Santa Ragione's, though it remains unclear exactly how Horses broke Steam's guidelines. If you want to judge for yourself, Horses will launch on the Epic Games Store, GOG, The Humble Store, and itch.io on December 2.
