Beunruhigendes Horrorspiel Horses von Steam verbannt und Studio mit „hohem Risiko“ der Schließung verlassen – IGN

I assumed the game would be about the Horse Dimension, but the actual game seems pretty cool and weird too.

This is one downside with steam, you get on the outs with them you lose a major distributor for your game

I’ve seen this story around a fair bit this evening. I would advise anyone who’s ready to grab their pitchforks to please **actually read** any of the articles that have come out about this.

This did **not** come suddenly, as they were initially rejected by steam when they submitted the project in 2023 for a store page + demo, and then banned when they tried to submit it again this year. While a reason wasn’t given initially, steam stated this year that it was over graphic sexual nature involving underage characters. To quote a developer…

>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. 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. We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-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.

It was an underage character riding someone who’s fully naked. Steam has permitted a *lot* of things sexually on their store page over the past few years, but they draw the line at anything involving minors in anything that can be construed as sexual.

The developers, in the **two years** between initial rejection and completion, never thought that this would be an issue, and are now suddenly surprised they’re denied the biggest gaming storefront because they never examined their own product. ~~Yes, it sucks that steam gave radio silence in that time, but if anything, that *should* promote extreme self-scrutiny on the developer’s end, which they did not do.~~ CORRECTION: Turns out the automated denial *did* provide some specification on the ban:

>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.“

yeah they have no excuse lmao

I don’t care for this type of game, and I do think they showed poor judgement with the original scene. However, given that the offending content was changed, that they have no way to resubmit the game, and that not having the game on one single storefront is expected to tank the company and has prevented them from securing a publisher demonstrates why Steam is in fact a monopoly. The fact that users like Steam doesn’t change this. It is so bizarre to me that this one industry has consumers that actively, aggressively are against competition.

Damn bro the steam bots hitting hard