After indie narrative horror game Horses was banned from Steam two years ago, it put the studio, Santa Ragione, at risk of closure. Studio cofounder and Horses producer Pietro Righi Riva had to make a difficult phone call to the game’s director, Italian filmmaker Andrea Lucco Borlera. “I was terrified for him,” Riva said in an interview with The Verge. “This was his first game and he put so much work, so much passion, so many years, and it was supposed to be his big breakthrough.”
But Horses has broken through even without Steam. Riva’s detailed accounting of the game’s multiple storefront bans caught the attention of journalists, developers, and curious gamers eager to see just what was so objectionable that the game couldn’t be sold on Steam alongside the likes of Sex Standing or Sex with Hitler 2. That attention has made Horses the video game cause célèbre of the moment, catapulting it to bestseller status on GOG.com.
But while this all sounds like a happy ending, Riva isn’t ready to breathe easy just yet. “I’m relieved because with all this attention, I’m probably going to be able to give back most of the money [roughly half of $100,000] that I had to borrow,” he said. “But we’re not out of the [woods] yet, no.”
Horses is a short, crunchy-looking game, boasting Dreamcast-era graphics with gameplay that’s no more involved than clicking things to put them in and take them out of your inventory. And while Santa Ragione has had success with Saturnalia and Milky Way Prince before the bans, it was largely a little-known developer. Riva is aware of how that looks, acknowledging that the bans have been instrumental in Horses punching through the noise.
“There is no way the same kind of interest would have happened,” he said. And despite that first difficult call, Riva says Borlera is quite pleased at what the bans have done for his game. “He’s extremely happy with the reception that the game is getting,” Riva said. “People are reading into the game and […] engaging with it in a way that he hoped.”
“There is no way the same kind of interest would have happened.”
That engagement, though, isn’t enough to make up for the access Steam could have provided. While Riva is grateful for the support of gamers and storefronts like GOG, it’s not enough, and he’s still very much in fear of Santa Ragione’s future. “Even with all the publicity, all the reporting, all the reviews, everything else,” he said. “This still does not compare to the kind of audience we would have on Steam.”
Steam has an outsize influence on the PC video game market. The indie studios that cannot afford the costs of porting their games to consoles are at the mercy of Valve’s vague, capricious, and often inconsistent moderation whims. Though Horses has found a roundabout way to relative success without it, Riva said that journey has been traumatic, affecting not just him and his team but his peers and future projects.
“I think there is going to be, in my case, and in other people’s case, a certain degree of self-censorship,” he said. “It’s terrifying, and it’s going to make people make safer and safer games, me included.”
