In late 2025 there was an indie game called HORSES, developed by Santa Ragione, that was banned from several major distribution platforms, including Steam and the Epic Games Store. Now why would a platform like Steam ban HORSES while still platforming controversial titles like Sex With Hitler, Shower With Your Dad Simulator, Femboy Futa Mania, and Marathon? According to the developers on the HORSES website, Steam rejected the game back in June 2023 and stated:
“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.”
After playing dumb for a large portion of the blog, the developers then state, “We think the ban may have been triggered during the initial Steam submission by an incomplete scene on day six, in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. 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.”
They then do their best to assure readers that the game is not pornographic. It simply has men and women either naked or in bondage gear wearing horse masks being ridden or tortured by other people. It only uses sexual elements to make people uncomfortable.
Mission accomplished. Good work team. Oh, they’re shutting down now? Fantastic.
Rest in piss.
Regardless, the situation created a firestorm on social media as people jumped to the defense of Santa Ragione. Proud keyboard warriors with contempt for things like “censorship” and “bans on depictions of minors in BDSM simulators” set out to fight for their right to creep. After all, they claimed HORSES is “art,” and any censorship of art is unquestionably wrong.
Fetish v. Art
In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart stated in the ruling of Jacobellis v. Ohio, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ‘hard-core pornography’; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
When it comes to drawing a clear line between art and fetish, I can’t lock down a perfect definition. There are some fantastic works of art that challenge the audience, the art community, and society. If boundaries aren’t pushed, society stagnates. We should experience works that cause us to reflect on our world and question its rights and wrongs.
But I also think art needs limits. A dramatic performance piece criticizing the medical industry that consists of a drunk man wandering through a subway stabbing people with used needles would no doubt be impactful, but it’s also wrong. Involving kids in sexual scenes is wrong, even if Reddit insists that it’s high art. But there are plenty of classic art pieces involving a motherly figure with a bared breast (scandalous, I know) holding a child. Something like that and HORSES both place kids in proximity to nudity, so why do I think the maternal scene is fine while HORSES is degenerate filth that crossed a line?
It’s because I view HORSES as a BDSM fetish simulator. Did I play it? No. I watched the trailer and every single danger signal in my head went off and screamed, “This is a fetish game.” I knew it when I saw it. There’s plenty of sexual imagery such as a perverse farmer licking his lips, the people in horses masks wearing leather straps and bondage gear, and the spliced footage of horses breeding. That last part is kind of funny because the developer included in their blog, “It is about tension, not erotic content. (We apologize if we got your hopes up for horse porn.)”
I’m not going to sit down and type out a multi-page research paper on the difference between art and fetish. I am simply going to say that I know it when I see it, and that kids should be kept out of fetish content.
Steam Doesn’t Have a Legal Obligation to Host Your Content
Regardless of how you personally interpret HORSES, there is a misconception about free speech that is deeply ironic. Defenders of HORSES said it was the developer’s right to make a pornographic game. It’s free speech. Artists’ free speech should be protected and censorship is bad.
But what about Steam’s right to free speech? As Gabe Newell cruises around in his diamond-coated super yacht, his company has the right to exercise freedom of association and editorial control. You cannot compel another man’s speech. So the same free speech absolutists defending HORSES became furious when Steam exercised its own freedom to refuse publishing the game. It’s fine to say they’re hypocritical for not banning other controversial games, but you cannot in good faith make an argument in favor of free speech that involves stripping the right to free speech from someone you don’t like.
“Free speech” says the government can’t lock you up for your freedom of expression. Steam is not the government. (Yet. Gabe might get bored and use some of that infinite money to buy a country or two.) Steam did not throw the developers at Santa Ragione into jail. It just refused to work with a developer that crossed a moral line.
The internet is a weird place. Different platforms are comfortable with different levels of questionable content. So long as it’s not practicing or promoting illegal activity, whatever. Enjoy your erotic Lion King fanfiction that really gets into the weeds with the fact that Simba and Nala were likely siblings. But a platform has the right to censor whatever they want. Their house, their rules.
Judgment About Judgment
We have a very free society, but freedom only functions if it’s accompanied by personal responsibility. If you are an artist, you are welcome to push the boundaries of society, but you must accept the responsibility of doing so. You need to accept that your “art” can very easily cross over into “fetish.” If it does, you need to accept that a distributor has just as much free speech as you do, and they have the right to reject your art. Compelling a platform to distribute content against their will is not artistic freedom. It is compelled speech.
It is not the death of art to allow platforms to use their discretion to censor something. It just means that the world isn’t obligated to distribute your BDSM horse roleplay simulator.