This week Santa Ragione – the Italian indie studio behind award-winning games like Wheels of Aurelia, Saturnalia, and Mediterranea – made the shocking announcement that it is likely not long for this world after Steam blocked the release of its upcoming horror game about “power, faith, and violence,” Horses. The situation is complicated, involving a scene meant to unsettle and push boundaries. But this is the case with many pieces of art. Steam, however, has shown time and time again that its standardized approach to game approval leaves little room for gray areas.
Horses, according to Santa Ragione, originally included a scene that Valve construed as depicting “sexual conduct involving a minor.” While Valve did not provide exact details when it first reviewed an early version of the game back in 2023, Santa Ragione suspects that the Steam steward took issue with a moment in which a man and his daughter visit a farm where the titular horses are people.
“The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the ‘horses’ are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one,” reads an FAQ about the situation from Santa Ragione. “What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag.”
The studio goes on to say, however, that it has since changed the character in the scene to be a 20-something woman, “both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character.”
Valve has evidently not been moved by this change.
"We reviewed the game back in 2023,” a Valve spokesperson said this week in a statement to PC Gamer. “At that time, the developer indicated with their release date in Steamworks that they planned to release a few months later. 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."
It’s important to note that all of this took place prior to the recent payment processor-prompted crackdown on NSFW content that’s rocked Steam and Itch. Since then, Valve’s standards have only grown stricter, with the company removing dozens of games earlier this year in tandem with the addition of a new, frustratingly vague rule forbidding 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.”
A store like Steam cannot operate without the participation of credit card companies and payment processors, so this leaves Valve in something of a pickle. But where Itch at least attempted to communicate to developers what was happening and stated an intention to “start working with more financial partners that are equipped to handle the kind of content we have,” Valve did as it always has: communicated minimally and vaguely and then moved on.
In its FAQ, Santa Ragione said that it feels more like Valve is making a “policy decision” than one about whether or not content in the game is actually legal, which gets to the heart of what Steam is: An algorithmically-powered machine where even the final few vestiges of human decisionmaking must adhere to robotically rigid strictures. This is to some degree a problem of scale; with tens of thousands of games releasing per year, providing everyone with individualized case-by-case attention is nearly impossible (though if anyone’s making enough money to do so anyway, it’s Valve).
But Valve is effectively creating its own laws, because Steam is no longer a market in the traditional sense, where buyers and sellers – in other words, regular people – would ultimately decide what’s acceptable. It is, as author, politician, and former Valve economist in residence Yanis Varoufakis told Aftermath last year, a technofeudalist megastructure, a plot of land on which developers work and toil while Valve extracts rent:
It looks like a marketplace, but it isn't a marketplace. It has none of the characteristics of a market. And the most important characteristic of a market is its decentralization. You walk into a shopping mall, you walk into a farmer's market, if you and I walk together, we see the same products. We can have a discussion about it. We can say 'Ah, this is crap,' that we're not gonna buy the stuff, or 'This looks great.' We can't do that on Amazon.com because you and I cannot communicate. The algorithm doesn't allow us. It matches you with a particular vendor, maximizing the likelihood of extracting a greater cloud rent from the vendor. And if you and I type the same thing in the search box, we get very different recommendations, because that's how the statistical model works. This is how the algorithm works.
Reviews, forums, and curators might present the illusion of such communication, but Valve has final say 100 percent of the time. It does not want to appear to be making decisions, though, which is why it shrouds the whole process in vague policyspeak. But no matter how much Valve removes human intentionality from the forefront of its operation, it is making a clear statement about what it – and nobody else – deems acceptable.
"Steam publicly downplays human curation in favor of algorithmic sales optimization, yet intervenes with censorship when a game’s artistic vision does not align with what the platform owners considers acceptable art," Santa Ragione wrote in its FAQ. "Steam’s behavior passively shapes which titles developers feel safe creating, pushing preemptive censorship. ... Mature works with comparable or stronger themes routinely appear on mainstream streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, where controversial directors are an accepted part of the catalog. This double standard suggests Steam does not treat games as art on par with film, and intervenes with censorship when an artistic vision does not align with what the platform owner considers acceptable art."
Steam is a relentlessly well-oiled machine optimized for the purpose of pushing products – games that adhere to well-worn themes, structures, and strictures. It recommends games along genre lines; it tries to algorithmically match you with games similar to what you last played at every turn. It is deeply traditional – conservative, even – in its construction. Sometimes art that seeks to provoke or unsettle gets through, but this is closer to a happy accident than the purpose of Steam’s design. Valve has built a machine that cannot challenge the status quo, where rare human decisions must reinforce that ethos to avoid upsetting the immensely profitable apple cart.
This should no longer surprise us; Valve drew its line in the sand years ago. But it’s important to remember where the company and the people running it stand – and to recognize that their decisions reverberate through the industry, deciding what does and does not constitute commercially viable art. Such a lofty position necessarily confers responsibility, but Valve refuses to accept it, and I do not imagine it will change its mind anytime soon. This is not to say the larger game development community should take pressure off Valve, but it’s also time to consider alternatives, to build spaces for and unabashedly by human beings. I know it’s far easier said than done, especially when you’ve still got to put food on the table, but what other choice is there?
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Nathan Grayson
