Horses Broke Even Without Steam. Santa Ragione Is Closing Anyway.

Santa Ragione’s Horses was never meant to be a safe bet. Even before it was refused distribution by Steam, the game’s premise felt like something smuggled in from a parallel industry: a stark, surreal horror piece about a farm of naked humans wearing horse masks, loosely framed like a lost silent film and fixated on one of the ugliest subjects you can tackle in games.

Yet in late 2025, Horses did something most small, experimental horror projects never manage. It launched without access to Steam or the Epic Games Store, moved 18,000 copies across a scattershot spread of smaller storefronts, and generated around $65,000 in net revenue. That was enough to clear every loan taken out to build it and to pay royalties to creator Andrea Lucco Borlera.

For a few days, it sounded like the happy ending to one of the year’s ugliest platform stories. Then Santa Ragione announced it was suspending operations anyway.

A surreal horror game that the biggest stores would not touch

On paper, Horses fits neatly into Santa Ragione’s body of work. Like Saturnalia and Fotonica before it, it leans on strong visual concepts and an interest in the darker corners of culture. Played from a first person perspective, you work this rural compound that feels like a ritual site and a work camp at the same time, flanked by bodies and masks and a constant sense of exploitation. Eurogamer called it “subversive” and “often very funny,” the sort of game that uses shock and discomfort as a lens rather than a punchline.

That was never going to make it mainstream material, but the trouble began long before anybody could meaningfully judge the content. Valve quietly refused to distribute Horses based on an unfinished build, and never provided the studio with a concrete rule it had broken. Months later, with launch looming on alternative stores, Epic followed with a last minute ban of its own. Behind the scenes, GOG and other platforms were still willing to host the game, but in practical terms the two biggest PC storefronts had closed the door.

Santa Ragione spoke openly in the run up to launch about what that meant. Steam is not just one store among many. It is the default infrastructure for wishlists, long tail sales, key distribution, bundles, and the kind of slow discovery that pays an indie’s rent in year three, not just week one. Without it, Horses was entering the market with a fraction of the potential reach of the studio’s older titles.

18,000 copies, $65,000, and a technical success

Horses launched anyway on November 28 across alternative PC storefronts like GOG, Humble and Itch. Over the next couple of weeks, the sheer weirdness of the situation did something that most paid marketing campaigns cannot: it made a small, uncompromising horror game headline news.

Steam had banned Horses. Epic had dropped it just before release. Articles and social feeds filled with images of its masked human livestock and discussions about why this game, specifically, crossed some invisible line when adult only crypto projects and more conventional gore were still being allowed through. For a while, you could not talk about curation and platform power without mentioning Santa Ragione’s farm of horse people.

The result was a brief but intense sales spike. According to the studio’s post launch statement, Horses sold roughly 18,000 copies and brought in about $65,000 in net revenue in its first couple of weeks. That number was not pulled from thin air. It reflected cash in the bank after platform cuts, taxes and fees, the actual spendable portion an indie relies on to pay invoices and salaries.

On those terms, Horses was a success. The studio repaid the loans it had taken out to keep development going and paid all remaining royalties owed to the project’s principal creator. Santa Ragione explicitly framed that as a positive outcome and spent a chunk of its announcement thanking players, press and fellow developers for amplifying the situation in the first place.

By the usual yardstick of niche horror projects, breaking even that quickly without Steam should be remarkable.

What Horses tells us about horror on alternative storefronts

The Horses story is not just about one embattled studio. It is also a stress test for how far alternative storefronts can carry a game that the biggest platforms reject.

On the optimistic side, Horses proves that a tightly focused horror title with a strong identity can still find an audience off the beaten path. GOG, Humble and Itch all gave it prominent placement. Specialist press covered it heavily. Players who care about experimental horror followed the controversy to where the game actually lived and spent money there. For a project that might once have languished in obscurity on the fringes of Steam’s new releases tab, that degree of attention and conversion is encouraging.

It also undercuts a familiar fear among horror creators that “no Steam” is the same thing as “no sales.” The 18,000 units Horses moved in its launch window are not hypotheticals or wishlists. They are full price purchases on storefronts that rarely drive those kinds of numbers for strange, small scale games.

But even at its most successful, Horses also reveals the ceiling on that model.

Santa Ragione has been clear that while this launch compares favorably to the first weeks of its recent Steam releases, those previous titles relied heavily on what came next. Year in, year out, sales from discounts, seasonal events, feature spots, key bundles and the long tail of organic discovery added up to the difference between “we finished a game” and “we can afford to make another.”

Without Steam, Horses has very little long tail to lean on. Alternative storefronts can give a project like this a solid initial bump, but they lack both the scale and the embedded user habits to carry a niche horror title for half a decade. Players check Steam every sale season. They browse its charts and recommendation feeds almost by default. GOG and Humble are destinations for a much smaller, more deliberate subset of PC players, and Itch’s audience, while creatively vibrant, rarely moves tens of thousands of paid copies for individual titles.

In that light, Horses looks less like proof that indies can thrive purely on alternative storefronts and more like an exception that still leaves the central problem unsolved.

Why breaking even was not enough to save Santa Ragione

If you only read the sales headline, you might assume Horses had secured Santa Ragione’s future. Debt free, in the black, a four star critical reception and a viral story about platform overreach. Instead, the studio is suspending operations.

The missing piece is margin.

Breaking even is not the same as being sustainable. The $65,000 Santa Ragione netted from Horses was enough to clean the slate, but not enough to keep a team together, fund pre production on something new, absorb an unexpected delay or hire more staff. In interviews and statements leading up to launch, co founder Pietro Righi Riva warned that the studio had about six months of runway to get Horses out the door. Between the months of uncertainty caused by Steam’s refusal and the last minute Epic pull, that runway simply ran out.

By the time Horses released and sales figures started to come in, key developers were already committing to other jobs and contracts. The company could not, in good conscience, ask people to turn down stable work in the hope that long tail sales on niche storefronts might eventually accumulate into a war chest for the next game.

So while Santa Ragione describes Horses as a financial success on its own terms, the wider business reality is harsher. In a market where platform holders can remove the main path to long term revenue, recouping on a single project is not enough. You need room to fail a little on the next experiment, to survive a lukewarm launch or a marketing miss. Horses took that buffer away.

This is the paradox at the heart of the story. The game did almost everything right. It shipped, it reviewed well, it generated conversation and curiosity, and its creators kept their promises to lenders and collaborators. It still could not keep the studio afloat.

The cost of opacity and fragmentation

Santa Ragione has been careful not to reduce all of this to a single villain, but the studio’s public comments point to a systemic problem with the way PC storefronts wield their power.

Valve has never given the team a clear explanation for why Horses was refused. There was no transparent breakdown of specific content or policy conflicts, no public standard that other developers could look to when deciding how to frame their own work. Epic’s late ban created an even more chaotic picture. Just days before launch, a game that had already been cleared and marketed on the store was suddenly pulled, again behind closed doors.

For larger publishers, those decisions are frustrating but survivable. For a small horror studio, they are existential. You cannot seek outside investment when the main digital storefront for your target platform will not even commit to listing your game. You cannot plan long term staffing when half your revenue model can vanish without explanation.

Santa Ragione argues that Horses is only a visible example of something that happens constantly in less public ways. Games are stopped in certification, shadow banned from discovery features or left in indefinite review limbo, and most developers stay quiet out of fear of harming future projects. Cases like Horses only surface because the teams involved are willing to risk burning bridges by speaking out.

The result is a fragmented release landscape where the rules are unclear and enforcement is inconsistent. That uncertainty filters backward into development itself. When your livelihood depends on the opaque standards of one or two storefronts, the temptation is to sand off any edge that might draw unwanted attention. For horror in particular, where the point is often to confront taboos and anxieties directly, that kind of quiet self censorship can be creatively suffocating.

What this means for niche horror going forward

Horses leaves horror developers and players with a conflicted roadmap.

It proves that an uncompromising, small budget horror experience can still travel without the biggest platforms. The combination of strong visual identity, focused themes and a compelling story around its release carried Horses to an audience that cared deeply enough to buy it on smaller stores, even while knowing it might not receive the same level of ongoing support and updates it would on Steam.

At the same time, it shows how fragile that path is. You cannot plan a studio’s future around the hope of going viral after a platform controversy, nor can you expect every taboo breaking horror concept to earn the kind of sustained media coverage Horses did. For every game that hits that nerve, dozens will not. They will simply be refused, delisted or never greenlit in the first place.

In that sense, Santa Ragione’s suspension of operations is less a verdict on Horses than a warning about the environment surrounding it. Alternative storefronts can provide lifelines, but without clearer rules and more reliable access to the main channels of PC distribution, they are unlikely to support many full time, risk taking horror studios on their own.

Horses will continue to exist on GOG, Humble, Itch and other platforms. It will be discovered by curious players in bundles and recommendations and late night message board threads. As a piece of surreal, unsettling horror, it has already earned its place. As a case study in how niche games survive outside the mainstream, it is a reminder that breaking even is not the finish line. It is only the start of a race that, for Santa Ragione at least, ended before the next lap could begin.