Update: Valve has now commented on this unusual situation, saying it requested to play Horses in 2023 due to “content in the store page.” That led to it sharing feedback and a subsequent decision to prevent the game from releasing on Steam.
In a statement shared with Game Developer, Valve explained that the step to play the game was not unprecedented. “This happens sometimes if content on the store page causes concern that the game itself might not fall within our guidelines,” a spokesperson said. “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.”
There’s no further explanation regarding why this situation played out as it did, or whether the developer did make adjustments based on Valve’s request. The original story follows.
Earlier this year, Valve changed its rules to prevent adult games from having early-access releases on Steam. That came in the aftermath of a broader push against adult titles on Steam and Itch.io, largely at the behest of banks and payment processors. The upcoming indie horror game Horses is rated M for Mature, but it’s not an adult title. Regardless, Steam informed the developer, Santa Ragione, that Horses was banned from the platform in 2023. The developer claims Valve has never explained its reasons for the ban in the two years since the ruling.
Horses is a first-person title that casts players as a ranch hand who spends two weeks at an increasingly bizarre and unsettling farm. The horses in this game aren’t horses at all. They’re naked humans wearing horse masks who are forced to act like beasts of burden.
Santa Ragione insists that Horses is not pornographic, and the publisher jokingly added that it apologizes if it “got your hopes up for horse porn.” Instead, Santa Ragione says it’s using “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.”
According to the publisher, Valve never offered any guidance about what it found objectionable or what could have been changed to avoid a ban. Santa Ragione did share its belief that the ban may have been triggered by a scene in the game that originally featured a young girl riding on the shoulders of a naked adult woman in a horse mask. However, the publisher added that the scene in question has since replaced the girl with “a twenty-something woman” because the dialogue and the dynamic of that sequence was better served by using an older character.
Without a Steam release, Santa Ragione admits that the studio may be at risk of shutting down. To recoup at least some of the $100,000 spent on development, Horses will get a PC release on Epic Games Store, Humble Store, GOG, and Itch.io on December 4. It will be priced at $5.
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