Horror game Horses removed from multiple storefronts as censorship scare continues

While the nudity is pixelated and the studio later changed the young girl to an adult to better fit the game’s story, Riva guessed that the ban came from the original version of the scene, which Valve may have seen as violating its hardline policy of not platforming games that feature minors in sexually suggestive situations. Santa Ragione argues that the scene was not sexually suggestive and is meant to demonstrate how the game’s “horses” are dehumanized. Despite making appeals in the years since and changing the scene in question, Valve has not budged—while the MPA gives film studios leeway to make content adjustments and receive a revised rating, Steam is not so generous.

As for the Epic Game Store, they sent Santa Ragione an email attempting to justify its ban, claiming that the game had an Adult Only (AO) rating (which Santa Ragione claims it hadn’t actually received) while making claims that it promoted animal abuse (Santa Ragione strongly denies this, arguing it’s a critique of this kind of abuse) and had “frequent depictions of sexual behavior” (which the studio also denies). If Horses had previously received EGS approval, as Santa Ragione stated, it certainly comes across that Epic changed its decision in response to the Steam ban.

This saga isn’t an isolated event. In July, Valve made an adjustment to its Rules and Guidelines page that reads as follows: “[What you shouldn’t publish on Steam:] content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.” Essentially, this change gives payment processors, banks, and internet service providers the ability to censor what is allowed on Steam and other gaming platforms. Valve would go on to ban dozens of games from the platform that week, and Itch.io would follow suit.

The purges came after an Australian anti-porn organization, Collective Shout, allegedly pressured payment processors to stop working with platforms that contained sexual content they objected to. Collective Shout appears to have connections to pro-censorship Evangelical organizations in the United States, and its social media account has signal-boosted anti-trans activists on social media.

If the ban on Horses is any indication, it seems that Valve’s policies remain both draconian and vague—the Hays Code was an undeniable blight on the film industry, but at least its idiotic rules were plainly written down somewhere. By contrast, Valve and other digital storefronts make opaque decisions in response to content that may no longer be in a game, all to appease the real or imagined whims of credit card companies; it is not great.