Valve spokesperson said: “Based on content in the store page, we told the developer we would need to review the build itself. 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… our final decision [was] that we were not going to ship the game on Steam.”
Italian indie outfit Santa Ragione now faces closure because its surreal horror project, due on 2 December 2025 for $4.99, will ship everywhere except Steam after Valve decided it featured “themes, imagery, or descriptions” it will not touch.
The studio has set aside enough cash to support the game for six months, although without access to what it calls more than 75 per cent of the PC market, it fears its chances of recouping its roughly $100,000 investment are slim.
Its press statement said “Steam’s refusal removed our primary path to reach players on PC, with no way to appeal and no clear path to compliance… In a de facto monopoly, opaque decisions like these can quickly determine a small studio’s survival.”
Horses is pitched as an enigmatic first-person horror romp where players ride naked humans in horse masks around a bizarre farm while completing unsettling tasks. Santa Ragione claims it uses bizarre imagery to challenge ideas about power, faith and violence, and rejects what it calls subjective obscenity standards. It insists that lawful adult work should remain accessible.
The Steam rejection predates the recent panic from some payment processors over adult content. Valve refused the game in 2023 when it was still rough and offered only the usual automated wording, which said the title seemed to depict sexual conduct involving a minor. The studio said no specific scenes were ever identified, and no request for alterations was communicated.
Santa Ragione said it believes the rejection is a broader policy choice rather than a strict legal one and stresses nothing in Horses depicts anyone who could be mistaken for a child. The team thinks the ban may have been triggered by an early build that featured a man and his young daughter visiting the farm and choosing one of the “horses”, which are adults wearing masks. The scene had a girl riding on the shoulders of a naked adult woman led by the player and was not sexual, though it suspects the juxtaposition was enough to trigger concern. It has since replaced the daughter with a woman in her twenties.
Steam’s original message said “we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor… if your product features this representation… it will be rejected”.
The studio said Valve never clarified what in Horses prompted the view and argues that the platform owner deliberately keeps its policies opaque to maintain flexibility. It said this might be tolerable in a genuinely competitive market, although Steam’s dominance means arbitrary decisions can make or break a developer.
Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva told Game Developer the past two years have been “profoundly disheartening”.
He said “The team and I have been extremely frustrated… we offered to comply with any request or regulation, and still we were treated without the professional respect the situation required”, and added that opaque rules push creators towards self-censorship, he said.
Riva said he feels “tricked and betrayed” by Valve after 14 years of business on the platform. He believed this history had bought the team a bit of professional courtesy, although the rejection has shown otherwise. He said it is hard not to assume malice when rules are murky, and the company insists the process is automatic and democratic.
He said the whole team has been under “immense stress”, and breaking the news to the game’s author had been grim. He added that criticising Valve publicly makes him worry about further repercussions.
Riva said the team is relieved to have finished and released the game and that, although they fear it will be Santa Ragione’s last, at least it will bow out with something memorably odd.