Santa Ragione’s horror game, Horses, getting banned on Steam with only vague reasons to back up its ban was an additional tally on the year for Valve getting mixed up in controversy regarding what it allows and what it doesn’t allow on Steam. Epic Games Store, seemingly, felt out of the loop, so it decided to join the fray by also disallowing Horses to release on its digital storefront, even though it was previously slated to arrive alongside launches at GOG, Humble, and Itch.io today, December 2, 2025.
The difference, however, is typical of the difference between Epic Games Store and Steam. Whatever Steam does, the Epic Games Store does worse. When Steam banned Horses, it did so based on an early, unfinished version of the game, and kept its exact reasoning and policies around why it was banned vague enough, preventing Santa Ragione from refuting direct issues Valve seemingly had with the game.
Epic Games, however, banned Horses approximately 24 hours before it was set to launch on the EGS. Per Santa Ragione’s website for Horses, Epic told the Italian indie developer that it is “Unable to distribute Horses on the Epic Games Store because our review found violations of the Epic Games Store Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies.”
The email continued, “The ‘Inappropriate Content’ policy prohibits content which ‘contains explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior or not appropriately labeled, rated, or age-gated.’ The ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policy prohibits content that promotes abuse and animal abuse. This content is prohibited by our Guidelines and cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store. Additionally, when we [Epic] filled out the IARC Questionnaire based on the content that we reviewed, it received an Adult Only (AO) rating. Products with AO ratings cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store (the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology).”
But prior to this email, Horses was set to be available on the EGS and had been approved for release on the store. So what changed? That’s the million-dollar question, it would seem, especially because elements that Epic is claiming are in the game simply aren’t there, according to Santa Ragione.
“The game does NOT contain explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior,” the studio claims in a statement. “All nudity in the game is completely censored via pixelation. There is never any visible sexual act involving genitalia and all animations are stylized and unrealistic. Additionally, in the three hours of gameplay contained in the game, there are only four brief and censored sexual sequences, with two of them happening mainly off camera…the content presented does not in any way promote abuse (including animal abuse). The game is a strong critique of violence and abuse in general.”
Santa Ragione also pointed out that when it filled out the IARC Questionnaire as part of the process to get approved for release on the EGS in the first place, it received a PEGI 18 and M for Mature rating, not an AO rating.
Even with these reminders, and Santa Ragione begging its contact at Epic Games Store to consider the fact that builds of this game had been approved multiple times, with a final achievement build getting approved well over two weeks ahead of launch. Santa Ragione received no reply from its contact, instead getting an automated message that its appeal had been denied. Epic also failed to point to a specific instance of content within Horses it took issue with, so even if Santa Ragione wanted to make changes to release on EGS, it doesn’t know where Epic believes the problem lies.
The whole way this story has evolved is extremely unfortunate, because here is an indie developer whose work revolves around trying to elevate the kinds of stories we can tell in video games, the subject matter tackled, and how more serious issues are tackled, that will likely now be shuttered because it won’t be able to recoup development costs for its latest, and now potentially last, release.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Steam allowed a game that directly promoted sexual abuse to appear on its store, and had to be told to remove it, only doing so in select regions. It was the developers themselves who eventually took it down entirely.
One of these games is a commentary and critique on abuse, the other contained explicit abuse and sexual violence for entertainment. It’s frankly disturbing that the latter was able to make it onto Steam, while the former isn’t given a place on the store at all.
