According to engadget, indie studio Santa Ragione had its horror game Horses banned from the Epic Games Store just 24 hours before its scheduled release on Tuesday. Epic notified the developer of the ban, citing violations of its inappropriate content and hateful or abusive content policies, specifically mentioning a prohibition on content that promotes animal abuse. The company also stated the game had received an adults-only rating, which isn’t allowed on its store. This decision came weeks after Epic had initially approved the game for sale. The developer’s appeal was denied just twelve hours later without further explanation. This follows a similar ban from Valve’s Steam platform, which the studio previously said put it at risk of closure.
The Dehumanizing Dilemma
Here’s the thing: the premise of Horses is, frankly, bizarre and deliberately provocative. It’s a horror game where a college student works on a farm populated by nude human adults wearing horse masks who live as horses. I mean, come on. You have to know that’s going to raise some eyebrows at the corporate content review board. Santa Ragione argues it’s a “strong critique of violence and abuse,” and that the nudity is pixelated with brief, censored sexual sequences. But look, from a platform’s perspective, trying to parse artistic intent from a one-paragraph description of a game about masked, naked people pretending to be livestock is a nightmare. Is it easier to just say “no”? For a risk-averse storefront, absolutely.
A Pattern of Vague Rejection
The more frustrating part for developers, and what Santa Ragione is really highlighting, isn’t necessarily the “no”—it’s the how. They claim Epic gave “broad and demonstrably incorrect claims” with no specific examples, a process that mirrors their experience with Steam. This creates an impossible situation. How do you fix a problem if you don’t know what the problem is? You can read their detailed FAQ on their site, but the core issue is a lack of transparent, actionable feedback. It turns content moderation into a black box, where appeals feel futile. For a small studio that’s invested years into a project, that kind of opaque, last-minute rejection isn’t just disappointing; it’s potentially catastrophic.
Where Do Indie Games Go Now?
So where does a game like this go if the two major PC storefronts shut it out? The immediate survival path seems to be the more open, curated storefronts. You can already find Horses on GOG, itch.io, and the Humble Store. But let’s be real: the audience reach and potential revenue there is a fraction of what Steam or even Epic can provide. This case is a stark reminder that for indie devs pushing boundaries, your entire business model can hinge on the subjective and often inconsistent interpretation of a platform’s content guidelines. It’s a huge, unpredictable risk.
Who Decides What’s Too Far?
This whole saga begs a bigger question: who gets to be the arbiter of taste and artistic merit in gaming? Epic and Valve are private companies; they can set their rules. But when they control the vast majority of the digital distribution market, their decisions have an outsized impact on what kinds of stories get told. Is a game that uses shocking imagery to critique abuse worthy of a platform? Or is the surface-level description simply too much for a storefront that wants to maintain a certain brand image? I don’t have an easy answer. But pulling the rug out from under a developer 24 hours before launch after previously approving the game feels less like principled moderation and more like a failure of process. And that’s a problem that goes way beyond one weird game about people in horse masks.
