Valve Provides "Additional Context" on Steam Ban of Indie Horror Game Horses

Valve has issued a statement providing "additional context" regarding its controversial decision to ban Santa Ragione's upcoming first-person horror adventure, Horses, from distribution on Steam. The Italian studio claims the ban seriously jeopardizes its future, as the game is set to launch on all other major PC storefronts, including Epic Games Store and GOG.

Horses, an experimental three-hour narrative game, sees players take on the role of a farmhand working in a bizarre world where naked adult humans, wearing horse masks, are kept as livestock. While the developer asserts the game is "not pornographic" and all characters are explicitly over 20 years old, Steam's automated refusal message in 2023 cited concerns about content that "appears, in [its] judgement, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor."

Santa Ragione had previously speculated that the ban was triggered by a scene in an incomplete build where a young girl rode on the shoulders of a female "horse," a scene the studio later updated to feature an adult character for creative reasons. The developer remains frustrated by Valve's refusal to review the finalized, approved build.

Valve’s Official Statement

Following significant media coverage of the developer’s plight, Valve offered the following statement:

"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."

While Valve confirmed that it requested a review of an early build and "extensively" discussed the developer's request to reconsider, the statement fails to detail why the final, completed version of Horses was not permitted a re-review, nor does it address Santa Ragione's claims that communication from Steam lacked transparency.