When Horses vanished from Steam, I finally saw who’s really censoring games

The moment Horses vanished, something snapped for me

I was literally waiting to buy Horses on Steam. I’d read the previews, I knew Santa Ragione’s reputation, and I wanted to see what this strange, taboo-drenched horror thing actually did with its ideas. Then I saw the devs post their FAQ explaining that, actually, Steam had already banned the game before it even launched, based on an old review build and a single controversial scene. Epic briefly had it, then pulled it too. Humble wobbled. GOG and Itch became the lifeboats.

I’ve been around long enough to remember politicians frothing about Mortal Kombat’s blood and Jack Thompson treating Grand Theft Auto like the fall of Rome. But this Horses situation feels different. It’s not just “old people scared of games” anymore. It’s sophisticated: payment processors, risk-averse platforms, and a culture war that’s decided sex and uncomfortable politics are more dangerous than ripping someone’s spine out in 4K.

And here’s the part that really pissed me off: Horses might not be a game I “enjoy” in the traditional sense, but I want it to exist. I want adults to be able to make disturbing, challenging, even downright nasty games without watching their livelihoods evaporate because some corporate policy spreadsheet had a panic attack.

What actually happened to Horses (as far as we’re allowed to know)

Santa Ragione have been pretty transparent about the timeline. According to their own FAQ and public statements, Valve looked at a review build of Horses back in 2023, flagged a specific scene, and eventually banned the game from Steam before it was even finished or meaningfully revised [source: Santa Ragione FAQ as summarized in the prompt]. That scene reportedly showed a child riding on the shoulders of a naked woman. No explicit sex, but visually, yeah, it’s the kind of imagery that makes risk-averse lawyers start editing their résumés.

The team did what any serious, good-faith creator would do: they changed it. The released version replaces the child with an adult woman, then actually leans into the horror of complicity. She talks to you. She understands what’s happening on that farm. She chooses to stand in it. From everything we’ve been told, that scene is now thematically sharper, less legally radioactive, and categorically not “child porn”, which is the specter everyone likes to invoke when they want to shut the conversation down [source: prompt description of revised scene].

But Steam’s ban stayed. No re-evaluation, no public explanation, nothing resembling due process for a game that had actually addressed the concern. Just a quiet, opaque “no” from the platform that controls, by Santa Ragione’s estimate, over 75% of the PC market for them [source: prompt quote]. When Epic briefly hosted Horses only to pull it at the last minute, and Humble temporarily took it down before reinstating it after a closer look, it stopped feeling like an isolated Valve thing and started looking like something much uglier: coordinated fear.

Fear of chargebacks. Fear of payment processors. Fear of a handful of moral crusaders emailing screenshots out of context. Fear of headlines that say “Porn Game With Kids On Steam” even when that’s not remotely what’s going on. And that fear is now dictating which stories we’re allowed to tell in this medium.

The payment processor chokehold on adult games

The really sinister part of all this is that Valve, Epic, and the rest aren’t operating in a vacuum. There’s been a wider, very 2025 wave of crackdowns on NSFW and adult content across major stores, driven in no small part by pressure on payment processors. According to reporting and dev testimony, advocacy groups like Collective Shout have gone after Visa/Mastercard pipelines by pointing to games that do cross the line-stuff that explicitly sexualizes minors or fetishizes non-consent-and urging processors to treat “adult games” as a contaminated category [source: prompt description of Collective Shout involvement].

Do I want actual rape simulators or anything flirting with child abuse on mainstream storefronts? Absolutely not. Burn that garbage. But the way this has played out is depressingly familiar: instead of targeted, transparent enforcement, we get a giant, stupid broom sweeping up thousands of titles at once. Steam and Itch quietly deindex games. Adult-tagged projects suddenly can’t take certain payments. Developers wake up to an email saying “we’ve removed your game due to policy violations” with zero granularity about what, exactly, crossed the line.

And here’s the kicker: Steam has now also banned sexually explicit games from Early Access entirely, which for a lot of indie devs is the only viable way to survive long enough to ship the damn thing [source: prompt description of policy change]. Mainstream devs can sell you a “mature” game with a billion-dollar marketing budget and a tame sex scene. Smaller teams trying to do serious, messy adult work? Good luck testing your systems or building word-of-mouth when you’re locked out of the biggest runway in PC gaming.

Violence is fine, sex is dirty, and hypocrisy runs the store

What really drives me up the wall is the sheer hypocrisy of what’s apparently allowed versus what gets you nuked from orbit. Aftermath’s Chris Person already laid this out bluntly: if slavery, torture, or cruelty were actually disqualifying, Final Fantasy XVI, Fallout: New Vegas, Dragon Age: Origins, and half of Western RPG canon would be gone tomorrow [source: prompt paraphrase of Chris Person]. Grand Theft Auto V literally forces you into a first-person torture minigame where you electrocute a guy and yank his teeth out on behalf of the government. That’s still up on Epic.

Mortal Kombat fatalities are interactive snuff films. Call of Duty has had you mow down civilians in airports. Larian showed up to the 2025 Game Awards with a new Divinity trailer absolutely reveling in photorealistic gore, ritual sacrifice, and brazen sexuality: skin melting off bone, public orgies around a burning body, a child revealed to be just as enthralled by the carnage as the zealots. People clutched some pearls, sure, but nobody seriously thought, “Wow, this might get banned from Steam.” Of course not. It’ll sell millions.

Contrast that with Horses, a comparatively restrained game whose horror is more about implication, complicity, and power than explicit gore. It’s inspired by Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, one of the most infamous films ever made, but by all accounts it’s less graphic than your average M-rated blockbuster and infinitely more thoughtful about what it’s depicting. Yet this is the game we’re treating like radioactive waste?

Let’s be honest about what’s going on. If you’re a gargantuan publisher, your “mature content” is rebranded as Prestige Violence™. If you’ve got a Game Awards slot and a console pipeline, your shot of orgies around human sacrifice is “bold.” But if you’re a small studio poking at taboo power structures, or taking sex seriously instead of as a player reward, you’re suddenly a liability. It’s not about “protecting players.” It’s about protecting platforms from controversy that might, might annoy banks and shareholders.

This isn’t abstract to me-it’s changing how I play and buy games

I’ve spent most of my life watching games fight to be taken seriously as art. Shenmue blew my mind as a kid because it dared to be slow and mundane. Disco Elysium later rewired my brain with its political filth and philosophical messiness. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into stuff that would absolutely horrify the “think of the children” brigade—not because it’s sexy, but because it’s about addiction, fascism, trauma, and all the things we pretend games can’t handle.

So when I see Horses get pre-emptively strangled, my reaction isn’t “oh well, one weird sex-horror game down.” It’s: this is the future they’re building for us. A future where the PC ecosystem is “safe” enough for Roblox, Fortnite collabs, PlayStation’s sanitized prestige ports, and whatever AI-generated sludge can be shoved into a launcher. A future where adults are trusted to spend $70 on power fantasies, but not to seek out deliberately uncomfortable work about bodies, sex, or institutional violence.

It’s already changing my behavior. I’ve started checking GOG and Itch first. I’m buying direct from devs whenever I can. And yes, I bought Horses on a non-Steam platform specifically because Valve decided I wasn’t mature enough to make that choice myself. If these corporations want to infantilize their audience, I’m not playing along.

“But some stuff should be banned!” — obviously. That’s not the point.

I can already hear the rebuttal: “So you just want anything goes? No rules, no lines?” No. That’s lazy. There are bright red lines: real-world exploitation, anything approaching actual child sexual abuse material, games that are functionally bigotry simulators masquerading as “satire.” Payment processors and platforms are right to treat that as radioactive.

The problem is that Horses isn’t any of those things. Most of the games swept up in this 2025 purge aren’t either. They’re messy, sometimes tasteless, sometimes brilliant attempts to deal with adult themes. Some are porn, sure. So what? Porn is legal. Adults consume it. Other mediums have entire ecosystems for it. You don’t see Criterion getting their catalog nuked because they host Pasolini. You don’t see bookstores panic-purging Nabokov because he wrote Lolita. Yet in games, one dev’s mistake in a 2023 review build becomes a permanent scarlet letter, even after it’s fixed.

We absolutely need lines. What we don’t need is faceless corporations quietly redrawing them every quarter to appease whoever screamed the loudest at their credit card processor that week.

If you’re an indie dev right now, you need a censorship survival kit

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not going to pretend I can solve this for every studio. But if I were shipping an adult or boundary-pushing game in 2025, I’d be treating platform hostility as a design constraint, not a hypothetical. That sucks, but ignoring it is worse. So here’s the rough playbook I wish more devs had before they hit “Publish” and pray.

• Plan a multi-storefront launch from day one. Do not treat Steam as your only lifeline. Get builds ready for GOG, Itch, Epic (if they’ll have you), and your own website. If one door slams shut at the last minute like it did for Horses, you’re not dead in the water.
• Document everything with the platforms. When a reviewer build goes out, track what’s in it. When a platform emails you about “concerning content,” respond in writing, ask specific questions, and log every change you make. If you later need to appeal or go public, you’ll have a timeline instead of vibes.
• Write an appeal like you’re talking to a risk committee, not a gamer. Calm, direct, specific. “Here’s the scene you flagged. Here’s exactly how we changed it. Here’s why it no longer violates your stated rule X.” Quote their own policies back at them. Force them to either engage or look obviously inconsistent.
• Lean on ratings and precedents. If your game would plausibly earn an M/18+ rating from an established board, say that. Compare your content to already-approved games on the same platform: “Our depiction of torture is less graphic than Mission X in Game Y.” You’re not whining; you’re exposing double standards.
• Build a direct relationship with your audience early. Mailing lists, Discord, Mastodon, whatever. Don’t rely solely on wishlists and algorithms. If a store drops you, you need a way to say, “Here’s where you can still buy our work” without begging a platform’s discovery tab for forgiveness.
• Coordinate with other “problematic” devs. If your game is adult, NSFW, or politically sharp, you’re in the same trench as a lot of people, whether you like their work or not. Bundles on Itch, cross-promotion, shared statements to press—these things matter when facing down faceless policy shifts.
• Have a PR plan for the worst case. If you get banned, don’t just tweet “F*** Steam” and log off. Prepare a clear, factual statement: what you were told, what you changed, what the current build contains. Offer reviewers context and codes on other platforms. Turn a platform’s silence into your megaphone.

None of this guarantees safety. That’s the point: the system is opaque and rigged against small teams. But better to enter that arena with armor than naked optimism.

Steam is not “PC gaming,” and we need to stop acting like it is

One of the most depressing parts of Santa Ragione’s FAQ was the line about losing access to “more than 75% of the PC gaming market” by being off Steam [source: prompt]. And they’re not wrong, practically. For a lot of players, Steam is PC gaming. That’s the problem.

When one company becomes the default gatekeeper, its internal squeamishness turns into cultural reality. If Steam decides something is too spicy for Early Access, entire genres suffocate. If Epic gets skittish about a horror game with sex in it but keeps GTA’s torture scene on the shelf, that becomes our unspoken morality: violence good, sex bad, money king. The only way that changes is if we, as players and press and devs, stop treating “not on Steam” as a death sentence and start treating it as normal.

Buy on GOG. Buy on Itch. Install one more launcher if it means supporting a team that got shafted for trying to talk about something uglier than “save the world with a gun.” If platforms want to infantilize their catalogs, fine. Let’s at least make sure they don’t get to infantilize us too.

Why Horses matters even if you never touch it

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to like Horses. You don’t have to play it. You might bounce off its aesthetics, its themes, its pacing. That’s fine. Art isn’t a content pack we all download for the same experience score. But you should care that a serious, adult-focused game was sentenced based on an unfinished build, revised in good faith, and then quietly buried by the biggest storefront in the world anyway.

Because if this is how we treat a game that is, by all accounts, less explicit than the average AAA gorefest, what future do you honestly see for riskier, queerer, kinkier, more political work in this medium? Where do the next Disco Elysiums, the next experimental weirdos who actually push at the edges of what games can say, find room to breathe if any deviation from a corporate-approved idea of “adult content” gets your payment pipeline threatened?

There is a rot at the center of this: a belief that games are only allowed to be “mature” when it’s profitable, flattering, and safe for shareholders. Everything else—messy desire, systemic cruelty, power, bodies—is treated like a liability unless it’s filtered through an $80 million marketing campaign and three focus groups.

I’m not okay with that. I don’t want a future where the only “adult” games that survive are sanitized sex animations in romance subplots and prestige misery for awards shows, while the truly deviant, uncomfortable, confrontational stuff gets quietly erased. Horses’ ban isn’t just a policy decision; it’s a warning about who gets to decide what counts as acceptable art in games.

For my part, I’m going to keep buying the weird stuff off the “safe” platforms, keep yelling about double standards, and keep reminding anyone who’ll listen that you don’t build a serious artistic medium by bubble-wrapping it. You build it by letting adults make and consume difficult work—and by calling bullshit when a platform pretends it’s protecting us while really just protecting itself.