Saturnalia and Wheels of Aurelia developers Santa Ragione have announced that they will “wind down operations and face a high risk of closing the studio”, following Valve’s refusal to allow their upcoming horror game Horses on Steam, PC gaming’s largest digital storefront by some distance. They say they have the funds to support and update Horses after launch for around six months, but claim they “will not be able to start new projects unless Horses somehow recoups its development costs without access to more than 75% of the PC gaming market”.
The studio have published a FAQ on their official website explaining the situation in depth. They claim that Valve rejected Horses based on an unfinished build from 2023, at which time Steam’s approval teams commented that “this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute”, with the specific addition that “we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor”.
We’ll return to that last line. Firstly, some context. Horses, if you’ve yet to have the displeasure, is an unholy cauldron of surreal body horror and silent cinema techniques, now due to release via Epic, GOG, the Humble Store and Itch on 2nd December. It casts you as a young man who must spend two weeks working on an isolated farm. After meeting the Farmer – a lumpen gargoyle whose lips and teeth get far too much screentime – you’re introduced to the titular Horses, who turn out to be naked human slaves in horse masks, their private parts blurred out.
Around two years ago, Santa Ragione submitted a “rough, incomplete” version of Horses for Steam approval. “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,” the developers comment.
Santa Ragione say they received an “automated” review statement from Valve in June 2023, rejecting the game on the grounds that it infringed Steam’s content policies. Find it in full below.
After review, we will not be able to ship your game HORSES on Steam. While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute. 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. While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation–even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area’–it will be rejected by Steam. For instance, setting your game in a high school but declaring your characters are of legal age would fall into that category and be banned. This app has been banned and cannot be reused. Re-submissions of this app, even with modifications, will not be accepted.
The developers spent the following months asking for more details about the ban, while offering to change anything Valve deemed unfit for publication – something that would have been relatively straightforward, given that Horses was still being made at the time of Steam review submission. They say that Valve have yet to reply, but they believe Steam’s content reviewers may have had misgivings about one particular scene when another man and his 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,” the developers explain. “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,” they continue. “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.”
The developers note 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.” They also comment that while Horses “does contain some sexual elements, the intent is never to arouse. It uses challenging, unconventional material to encourage discussion.” Valve have, of course, already rejected the argument from intent in their alleged statement above.
I’ve now played through Horses myself – look out for a review next week – and as regards the final version of the game, at least, nothing about the scene with the young woman strikes me as some kind of child pornography. It’s disturbing material, but it’s also very clearly a commentary on abuse and exploitation rather than an endorsement, with appropriate dialogue, and yes, the characters are depicted as adults (the young man protagonist is elsewhere described as 19 or 20 in a letter from his parents). Still, it’s not clear that this is the scene that has triggered Valve’s ire. We’ve mailed them to ask for comment on Santa Ragione’s claims.
Santa Ragione say they have invested around $100,000 making Horses. The developers invested $50,000 initially after signing the game with its primary developer, Andrea Lucco Borlera, and had hoped to cover the remaining costs based on sales of their previous, very good horror game Saturnalia. The latter has not sold as well as hoped, however, something Santa Ragione attribute partly to Valve’s refusal to give them Steam keys for a “great bundle opportunity” – this came around the time they were told that Horses had been banned from Steam.
Santa Ragione say that the ban has “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”. They have raised the remaining $50,000 via private funding from friends, “which puts us in a completely unsustainable financial situation unless the game somehow recoups its development costs”.
Santa Ragione perhaps merit some criticism on this last count – if you know that your videogame project is not “viable”, isn’t it more responsible to hedge your bets rather than continuing to raise funds? Still, I’m sympathetic to the developers’ predicament otherwise.
Given that it dates back to 2023, the Horses ban pre-dates the recent swathe of “adult” game delistings on Steam and Itch.io precipitated by a payment processor crackdown. In their FAQ, Santa Ragione are careful to draw lines between the situation and wider efforts to restrict access to sexual material online.
“It’s important to note that HORSES’ ban has nothing to do with the recent restriction on adult content pushed by payment processors,” they write. “This decision was solely in the hands of Steam’s curatorial team.” In other words, they’re putting the blame for all this squarely on Valve.
“Alongside ultraviolent titles, Steam distributes explicit pornographic games,” the developers comment. “[S]ome 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,” the developers go on. “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.”
Again, we’ll ask Valve for a comment.
Update: And here it is. Valve have shared a statement with RPS and other outlets about how Horses came to be blocked from Steam. It doesn’t really add to Santa Ragione’s account of events, or offer any insight on why the game was rejected, but it does suggest that the developers had planned to release Horses considerably earlier than this December, which you could read as contradicting Santa Ragione’s comment about submitting a “rough, incomplete” build from “halfway through development” for platform holder review in 2023. Still, I’m peering at tea leaves there. Here’s the 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.
