GOG backs Horses after the game was blocked from Steam

CD Projekt’s GOG platform has come out in support of arthouse indie game Horses after Valve declined to distribute it on its Steam storefront.

In a post on its social media channels, the Polish games marketplace said that it was “proud” to be selling Horses, adding that users should be the ones who decide what they want to play.

“We’re proud to give Horses a home on GOG, giving players another way to enjoy the game,” GOG wrote in a statement.

“We’ve always believed that players should be able to choose the experiences that speak to them.

“To support the Santa Ragione studio in this difficult time, we’ve decided to launch pre-orders on Horses today — grab yours and celebrate their creativity.”

Back in June 2023, Italian developer Santa Ragione submitted horror title Horses to Valve for approval to Steam. The PC giant opted not to host the game due to some of the content that the project features.

Santa Ragione has said that it faces closure due to Horses not being available on Steam as this represents a large majority of the PC games audience.

“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,” Horses director Andrea Lucco Borlera told GamesIndustry.biz.

“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.”

Responding to the recent press coverage about its decision to not host Horses on Steam, Valve has defended its decision.

“We reviewed the game back in 2023. At that time, the developer indicated with their release date in Steamworks that they planned to release a few months later,” the company wrote.

“Based on content in the store page, we told the developer we would need to review the build itself. This happens sometimes if content on the store page causes concern that the game itself might not fall within our guidelines. After our team played through the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines. A short while later the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed that extensively and communicated to the developer our final decision that we were not going to ship the game on Steam.”