The publisher’s official account:
IGN’s coverage:
It looks like Steam’s vague guidelines for mature content and their monopoly over gaming is once again causing problems for developers. Notably, this is different from the adult content policy previously discussed, as this game is not an adult game and was rejected before the recent restrictions on adult content.
I hope whatever marketing & visibility they lost by Steam’s weird actions gets made up for and more by this news coverage. That way they get the benefit of visibility without having to pay Steam’s massive fees. They need to be forced to be more transparent about their curatorial practices (or in a perfect world leave that to the users).
It’s a nice thought, but Volvo is not in a position to be “forced” to do anything, with the possible exception of world governments cracking down on gambling, which was likely the reason behind them wrecking the CS2 skin market rather abruptly with the patch last month.
The problem I have is with the developer, and their short horror game, having no idea what to do other than appeal the ruling so their $5 game can go back on Steam, even though it can be got on other platforms. Yes, I know Steam is so much bigger than the other platforms, but developers who are in business need to be smarter than this when money is on the line. Better that they ride the underdog train and generate interest in their game – unless their game is on its face unpleasant or worse, uninteresting.
In other words, if this game was unplayable on any platform, there might be cause for alarm, or if Volvo had a habit of doing this more often (and let’s remind ourselves that 40-50 new games go up on Steam every DAY,) I might care. But I’m already hacked off by indie devs not understanding how discovery works much less go without any real marketing plan, and this sounds a lot like what’s going on here.
Others may disagree.
That’s exactly what I mean when I say “forced”. I’d like devs to realize Steam is not the be-all-end-all, even if it is the largest market in PC gaming right now. Steam will continue with this behavior until there’s more competition. I believe we could get out of this Steam monopoly if more devs just stuck with their guns and generated sales without Steam in the mix.
I know this will hardly impact Steam and Epic’s bottom line. However… it does provide a starting blueprint for when this happens again in the future. Here’s hoping this is inflection point where indie developers realize Steam is not the only place you can scale.
Epic Game Store is only successful as a Fortnite Delivery System. Everything else we ever hear about it is how ineffective it is and how much money Epic loses on it. Which never discloses what it saves by not having to use Steam or paying Valve’s fees.
I came across an interesting take on the HORSES ban. Thought y’all might find it interesting: They Tried to Ban This Game. Here’s Why. | Nebula
I think peterspittech’s video is a pretty good consideration of the situation and I agree with it (though I have yet to play Horses, so maybe my opinion will change when I get around to it). I’ve been thinking about the ban off-and-on and I think the thing that bothers me the most is the amount of power publishers have in the games industry given that there are so few of them with so much power.
Steam, just on its own, is by far the largest digital distributor of PC games, and because of that their decisions can have a lot of impact on developers.
Then there’s Epic Games and GOG… what other serious contenders are there? I feel like there’s not much choice. If we looked at film or books, I feel like the situation is quite different, but I am not totally sure.
That is such an incredibly anti-art take that i’m surprised someone here would post it.
You’re basically saying artists should shut up and comply with the censorship. Either churn out what’s popular and safe from raising the eyebrows of the overlords, or make unique and thought-provoking experiences and forget about making a living.
Are you implying that Steam doesn’t significantly impact discovery and marketing? Not having the game on Steam drops a large portion, if not majority, of potential players at both the 1st and 2nd stage of the marketing funnel, especially if your marketing budget is small.
I’m not anti-art, but I have trouble regarding this scenario as “censorship,” especially when the creators are raising the issue about their company insolvency. The art is already available to anyone who can afford to pay for it, or in my case, have a friend play it on Twitch stream and experience it vicariously, then try to forget about all the fucked up imagery thereafter.
Being banned from Steam is likely to be the best thing Steam could have ever done to boost the profile of HORSES. Way better than just let it languish, undiscovered, as most games without any promotional effort, do all the time.
I find this quote from the publisher’s website particularly interesting:
We are committed to producing challenging, adult storytelling. HORSES uses grotesque, subversive imagery to confront power, faith, and violence.
With both Valve and Epic deciding to block the game, I wonder what incentives really drive these decisions. Valve generally has no problem with grotesque or uncomfortable games, or a wide variety of kinks (before the payment processor crashout anyway), but what remains unclear is subversiveness.
A few years ago, Valve banned games related to the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, also without explanation or any path forward.
I wouldn’t call it far fetched to suggest that games directly and emotionally critical of the systems and norms we’re governed by might be targeted for removal outside normal processes. Giant platforms like Steam and Epic are owned by insanely rich people, who also have powerful friends and business partners, and whose class interests are aligned opposite to ours. We’ve already seen it in the right wing capture of news media, particularly in the US.
What does one have to do with the other, or with what I said about your take?
If only that’s how discoverability and marketing worked.
Seriously? We’re doing this? Doing a bad thing was actually great because someone got lucky?
We initially invested about $50,000 to develop HORSES after signing the game with its creator, Andrea Lucco Borlera. We hoped to cover these costs with sales of our previous game, Saturnalia, which unfortunately sold far less than we expected. Nevertheless, we had lined up a great bundle opportunity for that game, which was denied because Valve refused to give us Steam keys. Around the same time, we were informed that HORSES had been banned and would not release on Steam, which completely erased our ability to find an external supporting publisher or partner to fund the rest of the game, as no one in the industry considers an indie game that cannot be released on Steam to be viable.
Screaming from the rooftops about being banned from Steam is likely the best thing the publisher could’ve done to boost the profile of HORSES.
I sympathise with self-imposed quests like “let’s make a game that will get banned from Steam”, but that’s not a serious publishing strategy, and this isn’t that.
I have nothing more to say in reply to this thread.