Indie horror game Horses is preparing to launch on December 2 on the Epic Games Store, GOG, Itch.io, and the Humble Store. But one place it won't be is on Steam, because Steam has banned the game for, according to the developer, reasons that remain unclear even after two years of back-and-forth with Valve. And according to the developer, this ban seems likely to result in the shutdown of their entire studio.
We spoke with Pietro Righi Riva of Italian studio Santa Ragione (Saturnalia, Wheels of Aurelia, MirrorMoon EP), who explained their side of the story. According to Riva and a detailed FAQ shared with IGN, Santa Ragione first submitted Horses to Steam in 2023, when the game was in a very unfinished state. "We were only about halfway through development and had scrambled together a build that could be played start to finish, solely to satisfy Steam’s request for a playable version to open a Coming Soon page, something we had never been asked for before," Riva explains. It was at this stage that Valve rejected the game.
However, Riva goes on to say that Valve did not offer any explanation as to why the game was rejected, nor was there any opportunity for the team to change whatever the offending content was. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get anyone at Valve to work with them to reverse the decision.
"Steam’s decision came without detailed feedback, and the ban notice did not cite any specific scenes or elements," Riva says. "For months we repeatedly asked what triggered the ban and received no answer. We also offered, unsuccessfully, to change any content deemed unfit, especially since the game was still early in development at the time of submission."
So what triggered the ban? Riva still doesn't know. While minds may jump to Steam's recent banning of a number of adult games to comply with sudden crackdowns from payment processors, Riva says this ban took place long before that was even a conversation, and all the content in the game is fully legal. He does have a theory, though. The automated review sent by Steam in 2023 included a link to Steam's Onboarding Documentation, as well as the following sentence: "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."
Horses, Riva says, does not contain any such content. All characters in the game are older than 20 "as communicated by their appearance and through dialogue and documents that you will encounter in the game." He also asserts that the game is not pornographic. It is, per the studio, "about the burden of familial trauma and puritan values, the dynamics of totalitarian power, and the ethics of personal responsibility." From the FAQ sent to IGN:
While it does contain some sexual elements, the intent is never to arouse. It uses challenging, unconventional material to encourage discussion. It invites players to examine why something feels the way it does, what it says about the characters and systems at work, and where their limits lie. It is about tension, not erotic content. (We apologize if we got your hopes up for horse porn.)
What Riva thinks triggered the ban is a scene that existed in the game during the initial Steam submission, where a man and his young daughter visit the farm. As the FAQ explains:
The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the “horses” are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one. What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag. 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.
Riva says he has tried everything. He has tried speaking to contacts at Valve who had previously worked with the studio on past games. According to him, they claimed not to know the specific reasons for the ban and said it would not be possible to find out and tell them. He's reached out to Valve again and again, but has yet to receive any official explanation of what content was offensive, nor an opportunity to resubmit it without that content. IGN also reached out to Valve for comment for this piece, but did not hear back in time for publication.
Riva also says he's had no issues with any other platform: GOG, Itch.io, and the Humble Store had no issues with it. Epic asked the studio to update just the screenshots on the game's store page so as not to include nudity, which Riva says they complied with, and the game was accepted. As for consoles, he says he's shown the game to console partners and hasn't heard any concerns about content. Horses also has received PEGI and ESRB ratings that would be required for console distribution. "The only reason we haven't actively started porting the game is lack of funds."
To be clear, Horses is unsettling to say the least. I watched a colleague play some of it at a demo at Day of the Devs in 2023, and it's not for the faint of heart. It's about a young man who comes to a farm to work a summer job caring for horses, only to discover the horses are actually naked adult humans wearing horse head masks, chained up in the yard. Snippets from trailers show the "horses" watching what seems to be horse propaganda, being ridden by other people by carrying them on their shoulders, being fed carrots, and being on the receiving end of humiliation and violence. It challenges the player to either accept what they're seeing and continue to participate in it, or try to subvert what's going on at the horse farm, a process that seems like it will be utterly terrifying and unpleasant in some way.
But Santa Ragione also has a solid track record of making and publishing artistic, esoteric, disturbing games with poignant messages, many of which have been up for awards for that very reason. Their board game Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space was nominated for the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. MirrorMoon EP was a finalist for the Innovation Award at the Independent Games Festival after its launch in 2013. More recently, in 2024, Santa Ragione published Mediterranea Inferno, which won the Excellence in Narrative Award at the Independent Games Festival. And Mediterranea Inferno is just one of a handful of games published by Santa Ragione as part of its efforts to promote the work of up-and-coming Italian creators, with Horses being another example.
Again from the FAQ:
We are committed to producing challenging, adult storytelling. Horses uses grotesque, subversive imagery to confront power, faith, and violence. We reject subjective obscenity standards and believe this kind of moralizing censorship evokes a darker past in which vague notions of “decency” were used to silence artists. Games are an artistic medium and lawful works for adults should remain accessible. We respect players enough to present the game as intended and to let adults choose what to play; lawful works should not be made unreachable by a monopolistic storefront’s opaque decisions. Steam publicly downplays human curation in favor of algorithmic sales optimization, yet intervenes with censorship when a game’s artistic vision does not align with what the platform owners considers acceptable art. Steam’s behavior passively shapes which titles developers feel safe creating, pushing preemptive censorship.
And yet, the verdict stands. Riva and Santa Ragione are stuck: one week until launch, and no ability to publish their game on the most massive PC storefront in existence.
According to Riva, the inability to release on Steam almost certainly means that Santa Ragione is done for. The studio already was struggling with financial troubles: it initially invested $50,000 when they signed the game with its creator, Andrea Lucco Borlera. They were hoping that sales of the team's previous game, Saturnalia, would help make that money back, but it didn't do as well as they'd hoped. Riva says they even lined up "a great bundle opportunity" for Saturnalia, but had to cancel it when Valve refused to give them Steam keys for again unclear reasons.
Around the same time, we were informed that Horses had been banned and would not release on Steam, which completely erased our ability to find an external supporting publisher or partner to fund the rest of the game, as no one in the industry considers an indie game that cannot be released on Steam to be viable. After two years of seeking these funds through traditional venues while trying to get the game unbanned, we had to seek private funding from friends to complete development, which puts us in a completely unsustainable financial situation unless the game somehow recoups its development costs.
Hopeless as this seems, Riva isn't closed to the possibility that Santa Ragione could be saved. He says if it manages to sell "tens of thousands of copies" without being on Steam, they'd be able to break even and keep working on future projects. But he's not banking on that. Ideally, he says, Valve would revert its decision and reconsider the game, but after two years, that doesn't seem likely to happen either.
However, Riva says their team won't fully disappear from gaming. The team has funds set aside for six months to support Horses post-launch with bug fixes and quality of life updates. Riva also tells me that the studio has known this was a possibility for a while now, and has been preparing accordingly. Its members have all found other gigs, some of which are in games. Riva himself says he's always worked multiple jobs in teaching, consulting, and curation while directing Santa Ragione, so he plans to "do more of that." And Horses director Borlera is already pitching new projects elsewhere.
While Riva would love to see a miracle leading to Horses recouping its costs and saving the studio, he says what he actually wants more than anything is for Valve to be transparent about its policies on mature content, which have fluctuated over the years and never really been clear. From the FAQ:
Alongside ultraviolent titles, Steam distributes explicit pornographic games; some of these listings acknowledge the legal grey area Steam mentioned in the HORSES ban message, by stating “All characters depicted are over the age of 18” in their store descriptions, and yet non-pornographic works like HORSES can be banned without context. By contrast, mature works with comparable or stronger themes routinely appear on mainstream streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, where controversial directors are an accepted part of the catalog. This double standard suggests Steam does not treat games as art on par with film, and intervenes with censorship when an artistic vision does not align with what the platform owner considers acceptable art.
As a final word, Riva urges game developers to stand up together to demand transparency from Steam. "I know developers are understandably scared of voicing their complaints about Steam, but I hope we can collectively ask for better conditions to make our work more viable and more creatively free," he says. "The current landscape is one where very few actors control the distribution of almost all games that are produced, and that should mean they are responsible not just for the commercial sustainability of the industry, but also for the growth of games as an artistic medium."
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
