Indie studio Santa Ragione said it is at risk of shutting down as its latest project won't be available on Steam, which is by far the biggest storefront for PC games and a key point of sale for many developers. Horses, a first-person horror game that blends gameplay and live-action sequences, is about a college student who spends a summer working on a farm. However, the farm’s “horses” are actually naked human adults who are wearing horse masks. It’s clear from the trailer that this is a game for grownups.

The studio plans to release Horses on the Epic Games Store, GOG, Itch and the Humble Store on December 2. However, Valve's content review team blocked Horses from Steam.

"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,” Valve told PC Gamer. “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."

Santa Ragione wrote in an FAQ that it's "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."

This particular ban precedes the recent censorship of adult-oriented games at the behest of payment processors. Santa Ragione wanted to create a Steam store page for Horses back in 2023 to help build interest. The studio says Valve wanted to see a playable build of the game before it would approve a Coming Soon page. The game was nowhere close to being finished, so Santa Ragione scrambled to put together a playable version of the game with “tons of placeholders.”

According to an email from Valve that the developer shared, it banned Horses from the storefront over "content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor." Santa Ragione said Valve didn't provide more detailed reasons for rejecting the game. Valve noted that it wouldn't accept further submissions of Horses, "even with modifications."

The developer claimed that it spent the next two years trying to change Valve's mind, but the company repeatedly pointed it to Steam’s general guidelines and rejected its “requests for review and appeal." Santa Ragione does have a plausible theory as to why Valve blocked the game from Steam, however. The studio wrote in the FAQ that:

All characters in the game are clearly older than 20 years old, as communicated by their appearance and through dialogue and documents that you will encounter in the game. We think the ban may have been triggered during the initial Steam submission by an incomplete scene on day six, in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm.

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.

As a result of the Steam ban, Santa Ragione claimed it will be “very difficult“ to recoup its investment on Horses, which it claims is “not pornographic”. It spent around $100,000 on the game’s development.

The studio initially put $50,000 of its own money into Horses after signing a deal with the game's creator, Andrea Lucco Borlera. It hoped to cover those costs with sales of its last game, Saturnalia, but that didn't perform nearly as well as the studio hoped. Horses was slated to be featured in a bundle, but that fell apart around the same time as Valve rejected the game. Santa Ragione said the Steam ban made it practically impossible for it to find an external publisher or partner, so it ultimately raised funds from friends in order to complete the game. As such, the studio claimed it is now "in a completely unsustainable financial situation unless the game somehow recoups its development costs."

Santa Ragione still plans to support Horses for at least another six months after release. It has set aside funds to cover the costs of fixing bugs and adding quality-of-life changes. But barring Horses finding success on non-Steam storefronts, that may be the studio’s last activity.

"I don't want to make a final decision before seeing how the game does on launch. But if things go the way that I expect them to go, then I think [studio's closure] is inevitable,” Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva told GamesIndustry.biz. "All the money we'll earn is gonna go to the author and to the people who have offered money to finish the project. So there will likely be no money left to make a new [game]... Unless a miracle happens and Horses does very well."