Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva on Horses, Steam, and possible closure of the studio

This year has seen more than a dozen studios close up shop – including Metal: Hellsinger studio The Outsiders and Godfall creator Counterplay. Now, there’s a possibility that Santa Ragione, the studio behind such critically acclaimed indie darlings as Saturnalia and Mediterranea Inferno, might join them.

The announcement posted by Santa Ragione today comes after a dozen failed attempts to find a viable way to finance the studio’s upcoming first-person horror game Horses. Along with the official release date of the game (December 2), the statement revealed that Horses was indefinitely banned on Steam in June 2023 – days before it was set to premiere on IGN’s Summer of Gaming event. “After launch, we will wind down operations and face a high risk of closing the studio,” reads the statement.

Pietro Righi Riva, the co-founder and director of Milan-based Santa Ragione, knew something wasn’t right when Valve went silent after the studio submitted Horse’s Steam page so that it could start collecting wishlists.

“It was weird because usually these page submissions are pretty quick,” Riva tells GamesIndustry.biz over a Zoom call. “So I ping them, and after a while, they’re like, ‘Before we can approve the page, you have to submit a complete build of the game to let us play through the entire game.’ Which is something that’s never happened to us before.”

Mark of death

The main problem with Steam’s unusual request was that Horses, which originated as a thesis project and has been in active development under Santa Ragione’s guidance since early 2021, wasn’t even halfway finished.

With no solution other than to bite the bullet and knuckle down with “tons of placeholders” and a few all-nighters, Santa Ragione was able to scramble together a complete version of the game to satisfy the digital retailer’s demands. But hoping that this would be the end of it proved to be wishful thinking as the radio silence continued.

“So I start panicking. I start emailing my Steam contact, and I’m like, ‘What’s going on? We need to release the [page]!'” recalls Riva. “Then, one day before the announcement, we get an automated message.”

As reproduced on the Horses website, the message read as follows:

“After review, we will not be able to ship your game Horses on Steam. While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute. Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.

“While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation – even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area’ – it will be rejected by Steam. For instance, setting your game in a high school but declaring your characters are of legal age would fall into that category and be banned. This app has been banned and cannot be reused. Re-submissions of this app, even with modifications, will not be accepted.”

GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to Valve for comment, and we will update this article if we receive a response.

Steam’s decision to permanently ban the game from its storefront was shocking enough. But to base it on a claim of content featuring “sexual conduct involving a minor” was even more startling.

While Santa Ragione was never able to get Valve to point out which scene in Horses triggered the ban – even after multiple attempts at appeal – Riva suspects it was a scene halfway through the game involving an underage girl who the player, a farmhand, assists on a horse ride (it’s important to note that in the surrealistic, black-and-white world of Horses, these creatures are naked people with horse heads and pixelated privates).

To avoid juxtaposition – and because “the dialogue works so much better when the person that delivers it is a grownup,” Riva adds – the girl was replaced with a twenty-something woman in the final version of the game.

In a similar turn of events, indie horror game Vile: Exhumed received the same treatment from Steam due to “sexual content with depictions of real people” ahead of its release this summer – although this title at least made it to getting its Steam page initially approved. After the ban, solo developer Cara Cadaver instead released the game for free.

Before learning about Steam’s verdict, Riva recalls that Valve had “informally expressed concerns” about the grainy live-action footage that helped Horses stand out during IGN’s Summer of Gaming showcase – a directorial choice shared both by Vile: Exhumed and Horses. Riva, however, dismisses the idea that this was the culprit.

As noted in the FAQ shared with GamesIndustry.biz, footage seen in the game contains no nudity and “was either filmed and produced with credited actors or sourced from reputable, fully traceable stock libraries.”

A losing battle

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of hearing that your self-funded project is being rejected by Steam – the digital storefront that has a de facto monopoly on the PC games market – is deciding what’s the best course of action.

“[At the time], we had around €50,000 invested in the game,” Riva recalls. “Obviously, everyone in the team knew that it was gonna be really hard going forward.”

As the studio head, he knew well that the funds would eventually run dry, so after helping everyone on the team, himself included, find extra side-jobs to support themselves throughout the development, he went to his friends for financial support as a last resort. “I’m like, ‘Hey, can you lend me €5,000?’ I asked ten different friends, and they all said yes.

“We basically continued developing with the money that we had left. But finding proper funding to complete the game at this point was basically impossible. No publisher in the world will fund a game that’s not coming out on Steam.”

Perhaps the most tragic element about Horses’ predicament is the interest it has accumulated since its premiere in 2023. “Before Horses, never did we have so much interest from publishers,” Riva reveals. “We actively had multiple publishers reaching out to us to say, ‘Hey, we wanna publish your game.’ And we’d be like, ‘Sure, except there’s one problem…'”

While the studio head didn’t name names, he hinted that some of these publishers were big and influential enough to give the whole team a sliver of hope. “Most of them would be like, ‘That’s not a problem! We’ll go to our good friends involved with Steam and get it fixed.'” But time after time, right up until this October, publishers that were previously interested in funding the project would come back bearing the same prognosis: “‘Sorry, there’s just no way.’ So they’d just drop the project.”

Shattered dreams

Andrea Lucco Borlera, the director of Horses, knew the game was perhaps too outlandish to be a best seller. But even so, he took the Steam ban hard. “When I realized the ban was final, it was not a good moment for me,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz via email.

“I was quite shocked and in disbelief, because I had invested so much of my life into this project. I saw it as a major step forward for myself and my future, and after all of that, it felt like everything was falling apart. I was left with a sense of helplessness, reflecting on how you can sacrifice parts of your life to achieve something, and then a big company can erase all your effort in a second.”

When asked about his personal take on Valve’s reasoning behind the ban, Borlera explains that everyone working on the game “was aware that Horses would be received in a divisive way,” but not to the extent that it wouldn’t get to see the light of day.

“The artistic intention of the game was to push the boundaries of the medium regarding the kinds of topics you can address in a videogame – even extreme ones – in a way that cinema already does.”

The first-time game developer, with a background in film, adds that at the time of submitting the game to Steam, only a handful of Italy-based developers had playtested Horses. “In my opinion, [Valve] simply wasn’t used to or familiar with a game like ours, so they picked a reason for ineligibility as an excuse to avoid any perceived potential trouble.”

Like any aspiring game developer, Borlera hoped the release of Horses would be his big break in the industry. Instead, those dreams were squashed before the game was even finished. “Before the ban, I hoped that after the release, the game might go just viral enough to make a career as a developer financially sustainable for the following years. The ban erased that possibility.”

If push comes to shove

As for what the Steam ban means for the future of Santa Ragione, with virtually no chances of recouping the approximately $100,000 needed to develop Horses, Riva remains sceptical. “I don’t want to make a final decision before seeing how the game does on launch. But if things go the way that I expect them to go, then I think [studio’s closure] is inevitable.”

He continues: “All the money we’ll earn is gonna go to the author and to the people who have offered money to finish the project. So there will likely be no money left to make a new [game]… Unless a miracle happens and Horses does very well.”

When asked whether a similar situation tied to Steam’s opaque policies might have happened somewhere down the road, if not with Horses then with a more daring project, Riva agrees it’s likely. “It’s possible. I think one thing we’ve been doing as a studio is trying to push the boundaries of what video games can be. And that means pushing on the visual tools that represent games, mechanics, and content. Eventually, if you are trying to engage with topics about the human condition, you’ll end up talking about violence, power dynamics, and some of the [sensitive] things that are represented in Horses.”

If there’s a possible silver lining in this situation, he adds, it would be the potential for any outcry around the ban prompting Valve taking a more open approach to tackling individual cases and offering clearer rules on acceptable content. “This would be a huge step forward.”

Borlera says he is putting aside game development as a hobby, and is already pursuing a career outside the games industry. Riva, meanwhile, who has helmed Santa Ragione since 2010, says he’ll focus more on consulting and teaching – side gigs he has taken on over the years to stay financially secure. “I’ll take some time to think and see what happens.”

He concludes: “It’s always been meaningful seeing that our games resonated with people. We’ve always known that we never made a game that had mass appeal. So everyone who connected with our games, I feel personally connected to in a profound way. And if this is the last game that we get to make, I would tell them not to be sad, because it [is a game that] can stand on its own.”