Following Valve’s decision to ban developer Santa Ragione’s first-person horror adventure Horses from distribution on Steam – a move the studio says seriously jeopardises its future – the PC storefront owner has responded with a statement providing “additional context”, saying it “extensively” discussed a request to reconsider its decision before refusing to do so.
Italian studio Santa Ragione, whose award-winning output includes Saturnalia, Meditteranea Inferno, and Mirror Moon EP, is developing Horses in collaboration with director Andrea Lucco Borlera. It’s described as a three-hour adventure about “the burden of familial trauma and puritan values, the dynamics of totalitarian power, and the ethics of personal responsibility”, and sees players taking on the role of a rural farmhand across 14 days one summer. Its mix of monochrome visuals, live-action intermissions, and interactive sequences is striking, as is its premise, which imagines a world in which naked human “horses” are kept as livestock – but despite the nudity, the studio is clear the game is “not pornographic” nor “[intended] to arouse”.
That’s important in the context of the controversy that’s emerged this week. Horses’ recent release date announcement was accompanied by the news Steam had refused – after making the apparently unusual request to review an early, incomplete build – to sell the game on its platform in 2023, with an automated message informing Santa Ragione it would not “distribute content that appears, in [its] judgement, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.”
Santa Ragione says Valve refused to elaborate, leaving it to speculate the decision was triggered by a scene – which it stresses was “not sexual in any way” – in which a visitor’s young daughter rode on the shoulders of a female “horse”. As the studio’s creative vision evolved, the daughter was aged into a 20-something adult (all characters in the game are explicitly 20+), but it remains frustrated at Valve’s apparent refusal to re-assess the finished game for review, despite the fact it’s now been reviewed and approved for distribution on the Epic Games Store, GoG, the Humble Store, and Itch.io.
That’s a lot of background, and the full story is even more involved; further details can be found in Santa Ragione’s Steam ban FAQ
In the week prior to news of Horses’ Steam ban going public, Eurogamer invited Valve to respond to specific points raised in our interview with Santa Ragione, but no reply was recieved ahead of the story’s stated publication time. However, following yesterday’s Horses release announcement, and the subsequent press coverage of its Steam ban and Santa Ragione’s likely closure, Valve has provided outlets with some “additional context” for its decision, offering some insight into why it requested a review of an incomplete build and claiming it “extensively” discussed Santa Ragione’s request to reconsider its ban before conveying its final refusal. Valve doesn’t detail why it opted not to permit a re-review of the final build, nor does it clarify if Santa Ragione was given a reason for the refusal – the studio claims Valve has not been transparent in its communication. Here’s Valve’s statement in full:
“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.”
Despite Horses’ Steam rejection, it’ll still be available for purchase via Epic, GOG, the Humble Store, and Itch.io on 2nd December. It costs €4.99/$4.99.