Weird games facing censorship: the case of Horses and the silent purge

The scene is almost absurd: it’s the day before the launch of Horses on the Epic Games Store. Two years of work, $100,000 invested, an Italian studio, Santa Ragione, literally staking its survival on this project. The marketing is set, the access codes are ready, the build was approved weeks ago. Everything is stable. And then the email arrives: “Your game has been reclassified as AO for inappropriate/hateful content.” Immediate status: banned from sale. Twenty-four hours before release, Horses ceases to exist.

This is not a procedural bug. It’s a flip-flop. Epic had already approved the project, had already given the green light after an initial review. The game was then reclassified as Adults Only via the ARC classification, all algorithmically (otherwise it’s less fun). A classification that, at Epic, means automatic banishment. In their statement reported by PC Gamer, the studio explains that it received no clear explanation: just an impersonal notification, an administrative axe. The scene is reminiscent of those absurd moments when, in an overzealous bureaucratic regime, a citizen’s life hangs on a mischecked box.

Except that in this case, it’s not a citizen, but an independent studio and a game that attempts to do something the market doesn’t like: disturb.

The cruelest part is that Horses had already been rejected by Steam well in advance. A blunt, opaque, indisputable rejection. The Verge reported the news: no usable justification, no instructions on what could be changed to make the title acceptable. Just a door slammed shut, without discussion. When Steam closes a door, a whole section of the industry closes behind it: 70 to 75% of the PC market disappears instantly for a studio. It’s more of an economic negation than an editorial disagreement.

So when Epic slams the second door shut, there’s almost nothing left. GOG will make a gesture and temporarily save the game’s exposure, but that doesn’t compensate for the brutal reality: Santa Ragione has publicly admitted that if Horses didn’t work, they might have to shut down. Their existence depended on a release that never happened.

The violence of this situation goes beyond the case of a single game. It says something about our times: it is no longer laws that censor works, but private platforms and their financial partners, banks, payment providers, invisible risk managers, who now decide what video games can show, explore, or tell. Without public debate. Without democratic safeguards. Without any countervailing power.

So what does this mean for a whole section of the medium, that of weird, uncomfortable, misshapen, politically risky games, those works that experiment, that disturb, that talk about shame, violence, trauma, that sometimes try clumsily but sincerely to say something that video games don’t usually say? What becomes of these alternative forms when the platforms that dominate the market filter what is acceptable, not in the name of the public, but in the name of “operational risk”?

Censorship never happens all at once. It always starts at the margins. And Horses is precisely that: a warning signal from a territory that many pretend not to see. But a medium that abandons its margins always ends up drying up at the center.

Horses: autopsy of a serial ban

One might think that Horses is the work of an amateur studio seeking easy provocation. Quite the contrary. Santa Ragione is a respected name in the Italian independent scene: MirrorMoon EP, Fotonica, Wheels of Aurelia… each time a unique, strange, sensitive experience, on the borderline between game and installation. Their work has often been celebrated for its formal elegance, its ability to subvert the codes of the medium without cynicism. We had the opportunity to talk with Pietro Righi Riva when Saturnalia was released in 2024. Horses is a continuation of this tradition: a black-and-white horror game, stripped down, raw, relying not on gore but on unease. It’s a game that deals with violence, abuse, and domination, but through allegory and metaphor, not fetishization.

The intention is clear: to evoke shame, the contamination of everyday life by trauma, the way bodies become battlegrounds. Santa Ragione has never claimed to “excite” or please; they seek to confront. To question violence rather than show it. To create a deliberate, almost theatrical discomfort.

It is in this context that we must understand the so-called “controversial” scene. A sequence in which a child appears perched on the back of an adult wearing a horse mask, all in a stylized, pixelated, deliberately de-eroticized state of nudity. This image is not a fantasy: it is a brutal metaphor for control, domination, and dehumanization. A scene that, in auteur cinema, would be interpreted as a symbolic gesture. But in the context of video game platforms, it immediately becomes suspect. Santa Ragione modified the scene during development to avoid any pedocriminal interpretation: adjusted framing, explicit intention, clarified iconography. Nothing worked. For algorithms, risk managers, and guidelines that lump everything together under the term “sexual content,” nuance does not exist.

The chronology of a ban

When Santa Ragione sent Horses to Steam during the development phase, the response was blunt: rejection. The vague reason cited was related to internal policies on sexual content. No discussion, no appeal possible, no advice on what could be changed. The door was slammed shut. The studio immediately understood what this meant: if Steam didn’t want the game, Epic had to accept it. Otherwise, commercial death was assured.

At the end of 2025, Epic seemed open to the idea: the build was approved eighteen days before release, the ESRB gave it a “Mature” rating, and PEGI gave it an 18. All the official bodies were in agreement: Horses was an adult game, harsh, but not illegal, not pornographic, not unacceptable.

Then, twenty-four hours before launch, Epic reclassifies the game as Adults Only. Not because of a complaint, not because of a bug, but because of a second internal form, a kind of redundant check that Santa Ragione hadn’t anticipated. AO, at Epic, means absolute prohibition. The guidelines simply invoke two catch-all categories: “Inappropriate Content” and “Hateful or Abusive Content.” It’s a conviction without trial, without explanation, without the possibility of defense.

The chain reaction is immediate: Humble temporarily removes the page, out of caution. Partners back out, pre-order links disappear. Only one platform takes the risk of keeping the game visible: GOG, which even decides to promote it. The result is striking: Horses becomes their best seller at launch. It’s the perfect irony: where the giants see danger, a smaller player sees an audience.

The cost of a ban

What you need to understand is that Santa Ragione is not a ten-person studio funded by a publisher. There are two of them, they are independent, and they have invested nearly $100,000 in this game. They have said publicly that if Horses does not recoup the investment, they will close. This isn’t dramatic posturing, it’s a balance sheet.

But being banned from both Steam and Epic means losing almost the entire PC market. Steam alone accounts for between 70 and 75% of the sector. Epic accounts for a few percent more. Together, they constitute almost all of the visibility of video games on computers. Being absent from these platforms is like releasing a movie in only two arthouse cinemas. GOG and itch.io can provide some support, but they are no match for the giants.

In another context, in a balanced ecosystem, such a ban would be reparable. Today, it means economic ruin.

Even more worrying than the sanction itself is the opacity that accompanies it. The reasons are vague, shifting, contradictory. Internal forms contradict each other. Responses are automated and impersonal. There is no avenue for appeal. No human contact. No details to help understand, correct, or negotiate.

This is not a legal framework: it is a private, discretionary framework, a set of shifting rules applied by companies that have no obligation of transparency, no cultural responsibility, and no accountability to the public. Steam and Epic thus find themselves, by market force, playing the role of an informal ministry of culture, but a ministry without principles, without democratic debate, without possible criticism.

The Horses case not only shows what happens to a game that causes discomfort: it shows what happens when artistic expression comes up against an infrastructure that has become so dominant that it alone can decide what deserves to exist.

And that’s where the problem really begins.

Steam and its peers: from a store to an unofficial ministry of PC culture

To understand the Horses case, we must first consider the size of the playing field. Steam is no longer just a store: it is a global cultural infrastructure, a vital artery of video game creation. All recent studies agree: Intel Market Research, Co-op Board Games, DemandSage… all place Steam at around 70 to 75% of the digital PC market. Added to this is an unrivalled strike force: 132 million monthly users, more than 40 million simultaneously connected, a platform that has become synonymous with “PC gaming” to the point of defining its standards, uses, and visibility.

Next to it, Epic Games Store looks like a shaky colossus: barely 3% market share, but a robust fortune thanks to Fortnite and a complete ecosystem in the background (Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services). It could be a counterweight, but in reality, it tends to mimic Steam on sensitive issues: same caution, same prohibitions, same refusal to take risks.

It is this duopoly, a giant and its smaller counterpart, that now controls access to the majority of the PC audience. When the two close their doors, the market immediately turns into a desert. And it is in this blind spot that games like Horses find themselves trapped.

When “curation” becomes cultural regulation

Curation on Steam is often talked about as a practical feature: choice of featured games, recommendation algorithms, tags, regional filters, age restrictions. But on this scale, these are not just interface buttons. They are tools of cultural regulation, comparable to those once used by public institutions, except that here there is no transparency, no accountability, and no democratic debate.

Curation is:

deciding what is accepted or rejected, and therefore the scope of what can be said;
guiding algorithmic visibility, and therefore the potential success of a work;
filtering by country, content, and keywords, and therefore the moral landscape that we wish to present to audiences.

When a platform that controls 75% of the market decides that a game has no place, it is not a simple editorial rejection: it is an economic sanction, often lethal. For a small studio, being delisted means being condemned to non-existence. For an experimental game, it means being removed from the field of vision of millions of players who will never search GOG or itch.io.

The most ironic thing is that Valve once claimed to have a liberal policy. In 2018, during a controversy over adult content, the official line was simple: “We let everything through, as long as it’s not illegal or trolling.” A kind of defense of technical neutrality: let us distribute, we are not moral arbiters.

This stance didn’t last long.

The market has changed. The pressures have shifted. And today, Valve has become the exact opposite of what it claimed to be: a company hypersensitive to signs of risk, quick to ban without explanation, obsessed with the threat of scandal or a break with payment providers.

The change is striking: since July 2025, Steam has thoroughly revised its policy on adult content. Under pressure from Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, relayed by the Australian NGO Collective Shout, several hundred games have been removed or blocked, often for obvious reasons (rape, incest, pedophilia), but also for titles that did not contain such content, or that dealt with these themes in a critical, symbolic, or metaphorical way.

The investigations are clear: all the same mechanism, a pressure campaign, a moral shift, panic, and behind it, panicked platforms that cut more than necessary to avoid the slightest controversy.

We are therefore left with an ecosystem where the rules are:

malleable
applied unevenly
aligned with external financial interests
and, above all, disconnected from public classification bodies such as PEGI or the ESRB, which had validated Horses as a mature game, not as a banned game.

Horses, a collateral victim of an already tense climate

It is in this atmosphere that Horses is attempting to be released. A time when Steam is already purging its catalogs. A time when Epic is monitoring its content with a rigor that it does not apply to the rest of its universe. A time when the slightest visual ambiguity is interpreted as a legal or financial risk.

Horses was not banned because it is more extreme than other works. It was banned because it came at the wrong time, in a system where absolute caution has become the rule, where the slightest doubt must be removed before it can even be discussed, and where the aesthetics of discomfort, essential to all art, are now treated as a threat.

So it’s not just a question of content. It’s a question of context: that of a cultural milieu that has allowed itself to be entrusted to companies that have no vocation to protect art, and every reason in the world to protect their bottom line.

Horses was not censored because it transgressed.

It was censored because it transgressed in an environment that no longer tolerates uncertainty.

Beyond Horses: mapping recent censorship

It would be comforting to believe that the Horses case is an anomaly: an excess of zeal, an administrative incident, an unfortunate collision between a sensitive game and a poorly written guideline. But that would be lying to ourselves. Horses is not an isolated case, it is a symptom. The most visible point of a systemic movement: that of a video game market that is slowly but surely sliding towards a zero-risk principle that eliminates anything that could offend, disturb, or upset, even symbolically, even metaphorically.

And this trend doesn’t just affect horror or experimental productions. It’s cutting through the ecosystem with an axe, striking entire sections of the independent gaming world.

Adult games/sexuality: No Mercy and the great purge

One of the most visible triggers was the No Mercy affair, an adult game removed from Steam that immediately became a rallying point for the Australian NGO Collective Shout. Steam was said to be hosting a worrying number of games featuring problematic sexual scenarios. The campaign snowballed, contacting payment providers directly and calling out Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal.

Steam’s reaction was brutal. Nearly 400 games were removed or made inaccessible. The sorting process was not surgical: it was a massive purge, which included titles that were clearly problematic (incest, sexualization of minors, explicit depictions of rape) and works that have absolutely nothing to do with these themes.

The collateral effects are spectacular. Queer, experimental, or simply erotic but non-violent games such as Last Call, Consume Me, and others are being delisted “as a precaution.” The specialized press describes a phenomenon comparable to that of the major video platforms after #Adpocalypse: faced with the threat of a public boycott or a bank block, we cut as widely as possible, avoiding anything that could remotely resemble a risk. This is no longer editorial control. It’s damage control. A moral policy applied by companies that fear a virulent article more than injustice.

Political or blasphemous games: the other side of censorship

Some censorship has nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with politics, or rather with the fear it inspires in tech giants.

The most emblematic case remains Devotion. The game was removed from Steam after the discovery of an asset mocking Xi Jinping, triggering a coordinated harassment campaign from China. What should have been a minor diplomatic incident turned into global censorship. The game disappeared. For two years, it was nowhere to be found, despite appeals from academics and NGOs. An authoritarian state managed, through calibrated digital outrage, to impose its law on an American company.

The same mechanism can be found in games such as Fight of Gods (accused of blasphemy in several Southeast Asian countries) and Six Days in Fallujah (blocked in some regions because of its depiction of the war in Iraq). Steam does not necessarily censor everywhere, but adapts content to local sensibilities, or prefers to temporarily delist rather than risk a diplomatic crisis.

Itch.io, the last refuge… which is also trembling

For a long time, itch.io was the antithesis of Steam: a free, anarchic space, a refuge for strange, experimental, queer, obscure, sexual, and mutant games. It was a platform that embraced the right of creators to explore areas that were more rugged than the mainstream.

But since 2025, even this bastion has been bending. itch.io has started to de-index all NSFW content to avoid conflicts with banks. The same logic, again and again: Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal don’t want to be associated with categories deemed “risky.” Faced with this pressure, itch.io doesn’t have Steam’s means to resist. They have to give in. The last refuge is becoming smaller, quieter, more fragile.

All of this forms a coherent, almost implacable map.

On one side, the platforms. On the other, the banks and their opaque moral guidelines. Between the two, conservative or activist NGOs, capable of influencing priorities through targeted campaigns. And in the middle, creators who are discovering that the greatest danger is not illegality, but ambiguity. Nuance. Allegory. Anything that does not fit into categories that are perfectly readable by an algorithm or a risk manager.

In this landscape, Horses is not an anomaly. It is the logical consequence of a system that no longer tolerates uncertainty, that eliminates anything that could be interpreted, misused, or discussed. A system where art must reassure before it disturbs. Where platforms act as ideological customs. Where finance imposes its morality.

And it is precisely in this world that strange, uncomfortable, or poetic games become the first victims.

The hidden layer: banks, payment providers, and remote moral panic

One might think that censorship comes from the platforms themselves, that it is a matter of their moral sensibility, their legal caution, their desire to avoid controversy. This is true in part, but it is far from being the main issue. In reality, the most brutal decisions do not come directly from Steam or Epic: they come from even higher up, from players who have no explicit connection to video games, but who silently control its entire economic ecosystem.

Because behind every mass ban, every wave of withdrawals, every tightening of content rules, we find the same names: Visa, Mastercard, PayPal.

This is confirmed by The Guardian’s investigation: Valve and itch.io have repeatedly stated that they are bowing to external pressure and cannot afford to risk a conflict with payment providers. Banks do not contact studios directly; they exert their influence on platforms, reminding them that access to credit cards, and therefore their entire business model, depends on compliance with their “standards.”

Who really decides?

The answer is staggering: it is not governments, nor public classification bodies (PEGI), nor the ESRB, which belongs to the ESA (an association of studios and publishers of which EPIC is a member), nor even the platforms, even though they apply the sanctions, but a handful of financial companies whose moral rules are neither public, nor transparent, nor open to discussion.

They are the ones who indirectly determine what can be sold. They are the ones who trigger waves of moral cleansing. They are the ones who encourage or terrorize platforms by waving the ultimate threat: disconnection from payment methods.

To fully understand the violence of this mechanism, one need only look at what triggered the 2025 campaign. Collective Shout, an Australian NGO known for its conservative views on the representation of sex, published an open letter addressed directly to payment processors, urging them to take action against Steam. This strategy had already been used in the crusade against Pornhub in 2020, which also mobilized Visa and Mastercard to force the platform to remove millions of videos. The logic is simple: if you let this pass, your brand is complicit. Reputational risk becomes economic leverage.

The blackmail mechanism

To gauge the extent of this leverage, let’s imagine a scenario: if Visa or Mastercard decided to suspend their services to Steam, Epic, or itch.io, even temporarily, the platforms would find themselves unable to sell anything within a matter of hours. Without credit cards, there are no transactions. Without transactions, there is no revenue. And without revenue, a store like Steam would immediately fall into an existential crisis.

This is the crux of the blackmail: “Clean up your content, or we’ll cut off payment access.”

Faced with such a threat, the platforms’ reaction is automatic. They sacrifice what is easiest to sacrifice:

adult games
politically sensitive games
experimental games

marginal games
ambiguous works
in short, anything that falls outside the box.

Why risk the global business to protect a few hundred tiny games, often cobbled together, sometimes controversial, rarely profitable? From a multinational’s point of view, it makes no sense. From an artistic point of view, it’s a disaster.

The gray areas: the panic of ambiguity

The heart of the problem is that the banks’ guidelines are neither public, stable, nor precise. They refer to general prohibitions, illegal pornography, sexual exploitation, dangerous content, but never clearly define what constitutes fiction, metaphor, or social criticism. They do not distinguish between representation and promotion. They make no difference between a game that sexualizes and a game that denounces.

This opacity has a mechanical effect: platforms over-censor as a precaution. Since they don’t know exactly where the red line is, they push the line well upstream. They remove games that are not illegal, pornographic, or problematic, simply because they are ambiguous, disturbing, and difficult to classify.

This is exactly what happened to Horses. The game is rated Mature by the ESRB and PEGI 18 by European authorities. For official bodies, it is an adult work, but a legitimate one. And yet, a second internal Epic form reclassifies it as Adults Only, a category prohibited from sale. Why? Because nuance does not exist in a system governed by fear. Because there is no longer any distinction between disturbing and shocking. Because it is easier to ban than to explain.

The double classification, M by the authorities, AO by a platform, says it all: we are no longer in a regulated cultural framework, but in an anxious financial framework. This is not censorship based on the law, it is censorship based on uncertainty.

And that is the worst kind of all: the kind that does not say its name, that gives no explanation, that offers no recourse, that turns works of art into collateral damage of a distant panic.

In this system, Horses never stood a chance. Not because it went too far, but because it ventures into a gray area, and now the gray area is off-limits.

Why weird horror games must exist precisely where everyone else is playing

The mainstream video game industry is sick. Sick of its titanic pipelines, its absurdly inflated budgets, its marketing departments that drive creation, its obsession with predictability and “measurable pleasure.” In this industrial architecture, everything that is uncertain is eliminated, everything that overflows is polished, everything that disturbs is discarded.

The solution does not lie in a new, more “daring” AAA game, but in the fragile and often mocked ecosystem of weird games: those clumsy, uncomfortable projects cobbled together in student dorm rooms or nighttime jams; those strange experiences where the form is not always mastered, but where sincerity, anger, or discomfort are real.

The antidote to the industry is these radical works found at A MAZE, in experimental jams, on the fringes of itch.io, spaces where creation is not filtered by the fear of displeasing. These are areas of research, laboratories where we try, fail, and try again. Where we create new forms.uvelles, often unsellable, sometimes brilliant, always alive. But here’s the thing: a laboratory is not enough..

Why itch.io isn’t enough

Itch.io, festivals, underground bundles: all of these are vital, yes. They are the fertile ground for strange creations, the place where ideas grow and transform. But it’s an ecosystem whose visibility remains microscopic on a medium-wide scale.

When you consider that Steam absorbs 70–75% of the PC market and has more than 130 million monthly active users, you immediately understand the disproportion. Releasing only on itch.io is an act of artistic resistance, but it also means accepting that 99% of the public will never see you. And in the case of a game like Horses, it’s especially suicidal economically. How can you recoup $100,000 in development costs when you voluntarily deprive yourself of the only space where the audience exists on this scale?

Steam isn’t just one platform among many, it’s the public square, the digital downtown of video games. Not having access to it is like staying in a basement lit by a flashlight. For strange games to survive, it’s not enough for them to exist: they have to be visible. They need to be able to meet players who don’t even know yet that they like the bizarre.

Disturbing art vs. zero tolerance

True horror, the kind that deals with trauma, shame, the relationship to the body, abuse, and power, cannot remain distant from turmoil.

It must border on the unbearable.

It must go where narrative comfort ends.

It must allow itself ugliness, ambiguity, symbolic deviance.

Do you want sanitized horrors? Hollywood produces them by the dozen. What video games do best is to delve into discomfort, and that is precisely what the current system seeks to eliminate.

If we apply a logic of zero risk and ambiguous interpretation, then horror loses all its power. It becomes decorative, playful, harmless. It no longer has anything to say about the world, about real violence, or about the scars it leaves behind.

Banning works such as Horses is not just banning a game: it is stripping the medium of the part of its language that still dares to talk about trauma, complex desire, unease, and taboo. And a culture that renounces its areas of turmoil renounces part of its truth.

This governance by fear has direct, immediate, and catastrophic effects on creativity.

For studios, this means:

self-censorship from the moment of conception, even before anything is coded.
the outright abandonment of essential subjects such as rape, incest, trauma, domination, and complex sexuality, even when they are treated in a critical, responsible, and artistic manner.
a drastic reduction in areas of ambiguity, i.e., everything that makes a horror film or psychological drama rich.

The result is that studios no longer write what they want to say: they write what they think Epic and Steam will let them say. For the audience, the consequences are just as clear. The cultural landscape is becoming smooth, standardized, and reassuring. Anything that touches on taboos is either relegated to the margins, inaccessible to the general public, or reduced to sleazy porn, tolerated only when it takes the form of explicit degradation that doesn’t try to say anything.

Between pornography and puritanism, there is no longer any room for the symbolic, the critical, the disturbing, or the ambiguous. It is a form of cultural impoverishment that does not say its name. A slow erosion of the artistic potential of video games, eaten away not by authoritarian laws but by a private bureaucracy obsessed with risk.

If the Horses case is so shocking, it is precisely because it highlights what we are losing, and what we risk losing even more, if we allow these mechanisms to take hold without resistance.

What can be done?

It would be easy to conclude that all is lost, that the hegemony of platforms and the timidity of banks have already condemned strange, uncomfortable, disturbing games. But that’s not entirely true. There are still refuges, tiny, fragile, often precarious, but real, where works like Horses can live, where they can meet an audience, where they can be discussed, understood, criticized.

First, there is GOG. When Horses was slammed in the face by Epic, GOG reacted against the tide: not only did they agree to distribute the game, but they promoted it. This simple fact contradicts the idea that “nobody wants these games.” The audience exists, it is ready to support, to pay, to commit, but it needs to be given access to the works.

Then there’s itch.io, still that shifting, anarchic, essential laboratory. Yes, the NSFW affair forced the platform to back down. Yes, the hegemony of the banks has weakened it. But itch.io remains the place where forms are born, where oddities flourish, where games that could never exist elsewhere take root. It’s a breeding ground. A free zone. A vital space.

And then there are the festivals: A MAZE, New Weird, Playtopia, all those minority but indispensable events where experimental games become visible, where they come out of the shadows, where they can be analyzed, contextualized, defended. The videos, conferences, and mediations that unfold there create a critical language that is sorely lacking in the mainstream ecosystem.

These places do not replace Steam. They cannot. But they offer sanctuaries and, sometimes, a ramp to the public.

It would be too naive to imagine that Steam or Epic will suddenly become defenders of the weird. That is not their role or their mission. But what we can demand of them is a minimum of fairness.

For example:

Transparency in rejections. An email that explains precisely what the problem is, scene by scene, image by image. Not an automatic form, not a randomly checked “inappropriate content” box.
A clear distinction between illegal content (actual pedocriminality, exploitation, etc.) and works that address these subjects in a critical, metaphorical, or symbolic way. We don’t ban Schindler’s List because it talks about Nazism.
A real AO option. Nothing prevents Steam or Epic from allowing the sale of Adults Only games, behind a strict age wall, with advanced filters and reinforced warnings. Outright prohibition is not inevitable: it is a political choice.

What we are asking is not that they become museums. It is that they cease to be ideological customs.

What we can do as players, critics, creators

An ecosystem doesn’t change only from the top down. It also changes from the bottom up, by those who play, write, recommend, teach, and criticize:

Buy banned games on platforms that accept them (GOG, itch.io). This is a political gesture, but also an economic one: we are preventing studios from dying.
Relay cases of censorship. Document them, explain them, contextualize them.
Promote weird games in the press, podcasts, festivals, and training courses. Treat them as works of art, not as obscene curiosities. Offer them a critical vocabulary, a space for analysis, a legitimate framework.

A small Italian studio, two developers, a strange, fragile black-and-white game that attempts to say something about shame and violence. And facing them: two colossal platforms, distant banks, opaque algorithms, guidelines written to avoid controversy.

If Steam and its peers decide that a game like Horses has no right to exist on their platforms, it’s not just a line in a catalog that disappears. It’s a whole section of what video games as an art form can say about trauma, the body, abuse, discomfort, humanity.

We never censor just one work. We censor the very possibility of certain forms of expression. And if we let this happen, the entire culture of video games will slowly take the form dictated by banks rather than that explored by artists.

Sources

PC Gamer — Epic bans indie horror game Horses just one day before launch
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/epic-bans-indie-horror-game-horses-just-one-day-before-launch-due-to-inappropriate-content-despite-having-approved-that-content-weeks-ago/

The Verge — An unsettling indie game about horses keeps getting banned from stores
https://www.theverge.com/news/837278/horses-banned-steam-epic-games-store

GamesRadar+ — Banned by Steam, $100,000 in the hole, and facing shutdown…
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/horror/banned-by-steam-usd100-000-in-the-hole-and-facing-shutdown-graphic-horror-game-dev-now-dropped-by-epic-games-store-roughly-24-hours-before-launch/

GamesRadar+ — Horses now topping GOG best-seller charts
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/horror/banned-horror-game-horses-now-topping-gogs-best-seller-charts-amid-censorship-controversy-and-its-back-on-humble-even-as-steam-and-epic-refuse-to-carry-it/

Déclaration officielle de Santa Ragione
https://www.horses.wtf/BannedFromSteam/

DemandSage — Steam Statistics: Market Share, Users & Revenue
https://www.demandsage.com/steam-statistics/

Co-op Board Games — Steam vs Epic Games Store Market Share
https://coopboardgames.com/steam-vs-epic-games-store-market-share/

Intel Market Research — PC Digital Game Distribution Market
https://www.intelmarketresearch.com/pc-gaming-market

SQ Magazine — Why Steam still dominates PC gaming
https://sqmagazine.co.uk/why-steam-dominates-pc-gaming/

Le Monde (Pixels) — Steam et itch.io censurent des milliers de jeux
https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2025/07/25/les-plateformes-itch-io-et-steam-censurent-des-milliers-de-jeux-video-sous-la-pression-des-prestataires-de-paiement_6623905_4408996.html

The Guardian — Why adult games are disappearing from Steam and itch.io
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/jul/29/why-did-adult-titles-disappear-from-steam-itch-pc-gaming-payment-processors

Collective Shout — Open letter to payment processors
https://www.collectiveshout.org/steam_open_letter

GIGAZINE — How Collective Shout pressured Visa and Mastercard
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20250726-collective-shout-steam/

Kotaku — Devotion removed from Steam after Xi Jinping reference
https://kotaku.com/devotion-steam-china-ban-xi-jinping-1833308565

BBC — Fight of Gods banned in Asia
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44415381

PC Gamer — Domina removed from Steam after transphobic patch notes
https://www.pcgamer.com/domina-removed-from-steam-after-transphobic-comments/

Video Games Industry Memo — Paranautical Activity removed from Steam
https://videogamesindustrymemo.com/2014/12/23/paranautical-activity-removed-from-steam/