If Santa Ragione is to go out of business soon – as it seems likely to, barring a sales miracle for its upcoming, banned-on-Steam horror game, Horses – it will be a tragedy for video games. It’s never had a true breakout hit, but by pure output alone the studio is a game development marvel.
We’ve been fans of the games themselves here at Eurogamer for some time: Christian Donlan gave MirrorMoon EP, an exploration game from the height of the indie boom in 2013, and one that brings forth alarming wonder from its ostensibly simple visuals, a 9 out of 10, way back when we actually scored things out of 10. We called 2015’s Wheels of Aurelia “a strangely perfect modelling of the real world.” Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star utterly floored me in 2022, a bolt of expression and raw lustfulness that felt, in a way, like the video game equivalent to the darkest edges of Neon Genesis Evangelion. No list of great horror games will be worth reading if it excludes Saturnalia, of the same year. The “artistically dazzling” Mediterranea Inferno was our first five star review for the studio, and very nearly our game of the year as well.
More than all that though, Santa Ragione has an extraordinary method for actually making games – extraordinary because of how effective it’s seemingly been at turning around exceptional arthouse games, one, but also because of how incredibly obvious a solution it is, to a certain kind of problem. For years now we’ve been discussing the games industry’s perpetual state of crisis, and many years before that lamenting its baked-in cycle of layoffs. What Santa Ragione has been doing to avoid all this is simply not work like the games industry. Instead, it’s effectively a film studio and production company, bringing on jobbing artists and creatives – from all kinds of mediums – to make each game in isolation, assisted by a small core of in-house devs. Only Milky Way Prince and Mediterranea Inferno, for instance, were made by the same creative lead. Horses’ maker, Andrea Lucco Borlera, is a former film student.
This probably isn’t a panacea, of course – the film industry is hardly known for its vocational stability, and many of Santa Ragione’s games are effectively made by one or two key creatives and some support staff – but it is something different. Something which has, for Santa Ragione and seemingly for its small stable of occasional developers, largely worked. If there’s a failure here, in the studio failing to achieve its big breakout in sales, it’s surely in the wider ecosystem of discovery – us in the press, the storefronts, the ‘content creator’ community, whisper it, maybe even the audience – than it is in how its games have been made.
There’s also a more important point here, which really takes me to the actual point at hand. The thing that matters is the novelty. Santa Ragione, of all studios in video games right now, is at the forefront of experimenting with the form. It’s experimenting with how games are made, and experimenting with the games it makes. And in video games, time and again, it’s been proven to us that experimentation, risk-taking, invention, whatever you call it, is everything. And when entities of outsized power, whatever the form, begin to impede that process, it is every single layer of this industry that suffers.
Dwell on it for a moment and you realise this has in fact been the main thing we’ve all been talking about for these past few years. Why is Xbox’s brand image in the gutter? Why have so many ludicrously expensive service games been dead on arrival? Why is the triple-A status quo, really even the concept itself at this point, in a seemingly perpetual crisis? We’ve gone over the business reasons, the structural reasons, the pandemic-interest-rates-bloated-timelines-engagement-economy-capitalism reasons, to absolute death now of course. But amongst every conversation there was a golden thread of truth, a constant, that persisted: when you stifle invention, however you do it in each case, from abandoning your own studios to forcing them into following a trend, you will destroy creativity. And in this fundamentally creative business, ultimately destroy yourself.
And so we get to Valve. Valve is not going anywhere. It is not going to bring about its demise with this one, ham-fisted attempt at applying its ill-defined and opaque system of moderation. (It’s also worth explicitly highlighting Valve’s reasoning here: that the game seemed likely to violate its content guidelines, and that after “extensively” discussing a request to reconsider and review an amended version, that request was rejected. You can view Valve’s full response here.) If anything – if Santa Ragione benefits from a bit of extraordinary, ironic fortune – it might even help, inadvertently Streisand-effecting Horses, a game that looked brilliant again but also challenging and odd and, honestly, probably not a big seller again either, into gaming’s wider consciousness. Few phrases can activate the sleeper agent gamer masses like the proclamation: “censorship”.
But the single instance of Horses, and its ultimate success or failure, is itself again besides the point. Santa Ragione could, and some might argue perhaps should, have foreseen Valve’s objection to the scene in question – and in hindsight would, surely, have made the changes to that very early build even earlier to avoid this whole problem (they certainly said as much in our interview with them about it). The point is the chilling effect, the monopoly, and the wider oligarchy-shaped problem the rest of the industry is settling into, too. Notice, amongst the outcry, how few actual developers have said anything public about the situation here. This isn’t a barb aimed at them, but just a statement of the reality: with a dominant share of the PC market (despite some reports, reliable figures of market share are hard to come by, partially as a result of Valve’s opacity), Valve is the gatekeeper to not only success, but mere survival for most studios. The point is that a more responsible gatekeeper would understand the nuances here, explain their reasoning without the requirement of a public scandal and, at the very least, allow a resubmission for review. It’s that developers shouldn’t fear it. And it’s that one decision, such as this, shouldn’t decide the fate of a studio.
Valve’s problem – which has always been its problem – is its intention to remain a deliberate ‘black box’, a purposefully inscrutable Royal Family of video games abiding by “never complain, never explain”, and one deliberately positioned as a kind of neutral bystander to the business of making and selling them. Valve’s goal is to be an invisible facilitator, in the vein of banks, payment processors, or those blandly-named arms dealers to both sides. It’s always been like this, it’s been criticised for this across various mini-scandals through the years, and it has never changed and never will.
But that shouldn’t stop us from making the point again. Neutrality is a myth. It’s a facade, a false wall, a Potemkin Village. Steam’s neutrality is fake in the way that “free speech absolutism” is fake, or “true libertarianism” is fake. There are always limits to freedom, and therefore always rules, and therefore always a rule-maker and rule-enforcer somewhere, putting their finger on the supposedly untouchable scales. And so what we have with Valve is the irony of a proudly libertarian organisation that practices, if anything, more like a dictatorship. Or maybe a managed economy (which often goes hand-and-hand with dictators). It’s an organisation that controls the market (and takes a heavy 30 percent cut from it), makes the rules, and neither explains itself nor answers to anyone. For a company famed for its bossless working structure, the corporate answer to a bearded recluse living in the woods, in many ways it’s its own worst nightmare.
It’s also just one part of what is, at this point, a much bigger problem for games, and indeed for so many forms of media now. It might sound hyperbolic, but freedom of expression is under siege, and at the moment, in the mainstream, it’s quite decisively losing. Steam’s main competition today for instance, at least within the world of PC gaming, is the Epic Games Store. The 35 percent controlling share that Chinese conglomerate Tencent has in Epic is of course an infamous topic for gamers (Tencent has close ties to the Chinese government, and is broadly considered to be a facilitator of censorship within China).
Ubisoft’s relationship with Tencent is also in the process of getting much closer, and EA is being bought by a consortium of Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund and Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s firm. Then there’s the astonishing censorship imposed by payment providers Visa and Mastercard earlier this year, after an apparent push from campaign group Collective Shout, which disproportionately impacted LGBTQ+ games and developers. And the recent news that Valve has, somewhat unsurprisingly, given it continues to operate there, just as it does in other censorship-heavy countries, complied with Russian censors’ demands to remove indie game Flick Solitaire for “promoting non-traditional sexualities” (read: queer ones).
At this point, it feels like it’s time to state the obvious: Valve is not your friend. Nor is any other business or corporation of any kind. Their incentives are not in line with their moral duties (in this case: making money from selling games, and treating the makers of those games with transparency, clarity, and and the courtesy of nuance). And they do have moral duties, despite claims to the opposite. Just because a business doesn’t need to act ethically to succeed, that doesn’t mean it ought not to act ethically at all. Businesses are run by people, and people are, even today, still bound by morality.
And this, finally, is the real point at hand. I am stating the obvious by saying this is wrong, that Valve ought to have not only a set of clear guidelines that it offers to all developers, but that it explains to them clearly when required. Payment providers should not decide what art does or does not get access to a paying audience – and therefore what gets made at all. Vast chunks of creative culture should not be owned by governments – any governments, let alone those that are autocratic, and that actively practice censorship and oppression. People who make video games, or any form of entertainment, should not have to self-censor in advance, which given its invisibility is perhaps the most dangerous consequence of all. There is so much to be lost here, and so much that we may never know we lost at all. All of this, again, is obvious. But at a time where the obvious things feel somehow less obvious than they did before, it feels more important than ever to just say it out loud.
