Banned by Steam, Crowned by the IGF: The Strange Year of HORSES

Twenty-four hours before launch is when a small studio is supposed to be checking build numbers and refreshing a store page. For the Italian team at Santa Ragione, 1 December 2025 was the day the Epic Games Store told them their game would not be going on sale at all. Steam had already said no. By the end of the week, a third store had pulled it too.

The game was HORSES, a short first-person horror film-game directed by Andrea Lucco Borlera. It launched anyway on 2 December 2025 through GOG and itch.io, topped the best-seller charts on both, and three months later won the Nuovo Award at the 2026 Independent Games Festival, the prize for the year's most experimental work. It was also nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

What HORSES actually is

HORSES runs about three hours. You spend fourteen days as a summer hand on a remote farm, working for a cryptic farmer who expects you to follow "a few rules". The tasks grow steadily more surreal and disturbing. The game is shot in stark monochrome, uses silent-film-style title cards, and cuts between interactive scenes and live-action intermissions that Lucco Borlera directed himself.

The themes, as the studio and critics describe them, are heavy: family trauma, puritan values, totalitarian power and personal responsibility. Lucco Borlera, a film graduate of Rome's Roma Tre University, has cited surrealist filmmakers Luis Buñuel and Jan Švankmajer, and the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, as influences. He pitched the idea after struggling to find a studio, and a chance meeting with Santa Ragione's Pietro Righi Riva turned it into a project.

The ban, step by step

The timeline matters, because the bans happened in very different ways.

• 2023: Steam. To set up a store page, the studio uploaded an early build. Valve rejected it. When the story went public in late November 2025, the studio shared Valve's automated response, which said Steam would not distribute content that, in Valve's judgment, appears to depict sexual conduct involving a minor. Santa Ragione called this vague and unfounded, said every character in the game is an adult, and appealed. Valve upheld its decision.
• 1 December 2025: Epic. Epic told the studio a day before launch that HORSES would not be published, citing its content policies. Epic also said an age-rating questionnaire had produced an Adults Only result, a rating the store does not allow. The studio said its own questionnaire had returned a PEGI 18 / ESRB Mature rating, and denied the game contained what Epic described. An immediate appeal was rejected.
• 3 December 2025: Humble. Humble delisted the game too, because its keys required an Epic account. It later appeared on the Humble Store.
• GOG stayed put. The store kept HORSES on sale and said it believed in creative freedom.

In February 2026, the argument flared again. An Epic executive told one outlet that "we love Santa Ragione", while maintaining that the game's adult content deserved to be removed. Santa Ragione answered publicly that Epic had made "provably incorrect statements" about what was in the game.

What the ban did to sales

There is an old line that a ban is the best advertising money can't buy. HORSES tested it.

• Launch week: it topped the best-seller lists on itch.io and GOG.
• By late December 2025: more than 18,000 copies sold, for roughly $65,000 in net revenue, enough to pay back the studio's loans and royalties.
• By June 2026: around 30,000 copies and about $100,000 in revenue.

That sounds like a happy ending. It isn't quite. In a breakdown shared in June 2026, roughly $30,000 went to Lucco Borlera for years of work, $62,000 went to private backers (covering their $50,000 investment plus returns), and Santa Ragione kept about $8,000. Righi Riva called that sum "insufficient to fund a new project". The studio has spoken openly about planning for a possible dissolution, and pointed out that a typical indie lives on years of slow "long tail" sales on Steam, the exact revenue HORSES can't reach.

Who are Santa Ragione?

Santa Ragione was founded in 2010 by Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi, and has built one of Europe's most distinctive catalogues of small, story-driven games. Its titles include Wheels of Aurelia, Mediterranea Inferno and Saturnalia, the game that came just before HORSES.

Critical acclaim, as the studio's situation shows, does not guarantee commercial safety. HORSES itself drew a mixed critical reception: a Metacritic score of 73, with critics split between praise for its filmic, silent-cinema craft and complaints about repetitive play. Many reviewers agreed on one point, though: the game is disturbing, but not explicit in the way the bans implied.

Why the IGF prize matters

The Nuovo Award exists to reward games that push the medium somewhere new, and juries have a long record of picking odd, uncomfortable work. Giving it to HORSES was not a protest vote, but it did make a point: the people who judge indie games for a living looked at the same build that two major stores refused and decided it was art worth celebrating. It also won Best Experience at the Italian Video Game Awards.

For other small studios, the lesson is sobering. A single platform's decision, made with little explanation, can remove most of a game's possible market before launch day. GOG and itch.io proved there is an audience willing to follow a game elsewhere, but not, on these numbers, a big enough one to keep a studio running.

It is worth being precise about what the bans were not. Neither Steam nor Epic accused the studio of breaking the law, and both stores are entitled to curate what they sell. The complaint from Santa Ragione, and from many developers who rallied behind it, is about process: decisions delivered late, explained briefly, and impossible to fix by editing the game. A studio that can't learn what it did wrong can't change it.

By the numbers

• 3 hours: approximate length of HORSES.
• 14: in-game days on the farm.
• 2: major PC stores that refused it (Steam and the Epic Games Store).
• ~30,000: copies sold by June 2026.
• ~$8,000: what Santa Ragione kept from about $100,000 in revenue.

What to watch

The open question is whether Santa Ragione survives as a team. Its next project depends on money HORSES has not generated, and the studio has said so plainly. The wider question is about the stores. Steam and Epic set the rules for most of the PC market, and both say their policies are applied consistently. HORSES is now the clearest recent case of a critically recognised game living almost entirely outside them.

HORSES is available on GOG and itch.io for Windows. It is intended for adults. If you want to see how this year's IGF went for everyone else, read our Titanium Court story.