Horses developer interview: 'We might not be able to do a new thing.'

3 days ago 8

Director Pietro Righi Riva wants players to reflect on why the game was banned

Cover of the game HORSES from Santa Ragione

While most of the gaming world’s attention may currently be focused on the upcoming Game Awards, one story tells us more about the state of the industry than the shining lights of the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles ever will. Last week, Horses, a narrative horror game from Italian indie developer Santa Ragione, was pulled from the Epic Store just a few hours before its launch.

Horses had already suffered a ban from Steam during development, which cut out the majority of the revenue an indie game can aspire to make. Polygon’s review found the game not so scandalous after all, raising important questions about censorship: “Santa Ragione finds itself at the center of a humiliation ritual now, as storefronts exert their power to ensure that the studio is punished for daring to make uncomfortable art.”

After learning that the impact of the bans on the game’s sales means that Santa Ragione will likely never make another game, I sat down with Horses producer Pietro Righi Riva to give him a chance to tell his side of the story.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

A procession of nude horses walks in a line in Horses.

Polygon: Santa Ragione is a small studio, but you actually have a long history in game design and production. What's your philosophy behind making games?

Pietro Righi Riva: There is a broader theoretical background in how we try to make games that talk about the human condition, first, meaning that we seek projects and start projects trying to say something about society, politics, how humans interact, how personal, individual stories, fictional or real, reflect and put lenses on wider issues.

In practice, though, it's not just an ambition thing, but it's also a design principle in recognizing that we are in a unique position of not being able to compete with other studios on established commercial mainstream genres — like, we would never be able to make the best Silksong, right? That amount of expertise, effort, talent, and dedication, and all that is needed to compete in that space, is beyond the scope of what we do here at the studio.

Instead, what we think we are good at is trying to do experimentation on how to use gameplay to talk about things. So, finding new systems, new mechanics, new genres, and trying to contribute a bit to a dictionary or a grammar of interaction to be used to talk about novel things that haven't been explored in games yet.

And I think everything you just said is evident in Horses. Has the publicity that you've gotten from everything that happened compensated, in terms of sales, for the fact that you’re not available on the most important platforms?

It's still hard to say, and we will probably publish actual numbers in the next few days if we can. But for sure, the reaction and the attention and the support, and the public participation in supporting and preserving and helping the studio, has made a huge, huge difference compared to whether the game had to be released exclusively outside of Steam and without any public outcry or any public discourse surrounding the game.

It's hard to say still if, in the end, the game would have been more successful just being available on Steam, because we'll never know what it would have been like if we had managed to get the Steam page up and collect wishlists and build traction like any other game that is available on Steam. Also because every game is unique. Every game is different. Every game has a different appeal to the mainstream. I do think that Horses of all of our games has a specific mainstream appeal more than anything that we've done before. I mean, aside from the controversy that surrounded its launch.

I was going to ask how many copies you’ve sold until now, if you can disclose a number.

I'm just gonna give you a rough number, and it might be incorrect, just because I haven't figured out the exact numbers yet. But it's gonna be around 10,000 units total for the first week, which is great. It's not a huge number, but it's absolutely wonderful, and we're very happy.

Is this more or less the number that you needed to pay back the money you borrowed to complete the development of the game after it was banned from Steam?

Not really. We are getting closer to that number, maybe we are getting closer to being able to get the money that we need to give back to the lenders that helped fund the second half of development. But yeah, you have to take into account taxes, platform cuts and all of that. But it looks like we will be able to give that money back, and that already makes a big difference, because I can sleep at night and not feel too guilty for borrowing that money.

After Steam pre-banned the game, you've kept developing it. But then Epic Games actually pulled out just before the game was launched. What was worse?

Epic is by far the situation that was hardest for us to handle. Not in terms of numbers, but in terms of how suddenly it was happening, 24 hours before launch, and also because they didn't judge the game based on what it was, and the feedback that they gave to us was completely inconsistent with what is actually in the game. And [it came] at a point where it was going to be very clear for everyone that those things are not in the game, like frequent and explicit sexual scenes. No one playing the game, through the game, through the couple of hours that the game lasts, would come back thinking that there are frequent and explicit sexual things, just because that's just not true.

So this is not a case of being ambiguous on purpose and not telling you what is wrong. It's literally writing things that are not in the game. And that process also got stuck at the appeal. We tried to fight back. We haven't heard back from the last email we sent them. And I still hope we can figure it out. And I still hope, with the reviews that come out, and you can see the gameplay online everywhere, that they are going to go back to the actual game and look at it and be like, hey, actually, these things are not in the game.

One thing stood out to me from your report of the events: the lack of communication. It has become a very common complaint, not just inside the gaming bubble, but in general, when dealing with big companies online. Once a decision is taken, in theory, you can appeal, but in practice, you get these standard, possibly automated replies that basically tell you: actually, we don't care.

Yes, and it happened in very different ways. With Steam, they were vague. We asked them, what is it that's wrong with the game? Tell us, we're gonna change it. And they were like, “No, we won't tell you. And also, you can't resubmit.” So it's like, there is no process for appealing, there is no process for complying with guidelines and regulations. There is just one strike out, we decided against, and we're not going to tell you exactly why, and you cannot resubmit.

But they've always kept the conversation — as you said, it's not really a conversation — but the communication channel open. So we would email them and be like, “Hey, actually, can we resubmit? Can we do that?” And they’d be like, “No,” but they didn't ghost us. They kept telling us, “You can't resubmit. We will not review it again.

I read somewhere that they reviewed an older build and decided to still ban the game. No, that never happened. They just refused from the very first review to ever consider another version of the game for resubmission. And they were very, very coherent in that, in the sense that they just stuck with their first feedback that was, “We're not going to look at this game again.”

With Epic, it’s more like you said. Their email said you can appeal, reply to this email or open a ticket to appeal, and we replied immediately. We're like, “Hey, actually, what you wrote, it's not true. These are the ratings that we got for IARC. They're still online. They're still uploaded in IARC, there is no frequent, explicit, sexual content. It’s very much a game against abuse, not promoting abuse.” But their answer to that appeal was just an automated email. And then further communication has been ignored so far. But we'll see. We'll see if anything else comes out of it. But certainly you get this feeling that you're stuck in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic system that is meant to prevent you from making change and getting results.

This could be the topic of your next game.

Yeah, I don’t know about that.

I imagine you wouldn’t want to relive that nightmare.

In 10 years, maybe.

Why do you think that, among a plethora of controversial games out there, Horses elicited this type of response? Why your game?

Many people have written very interesting theories about that, regarding the game's missions, the visual style, the references, the game's style in depicting these topics, and the politics that the game criticizes. And you know, all of these are interesting to think about, but I'm trying not to. I can't. It feels hard for me to speculate as one of the creators of the game. I feel like this is a very important conversation to have, trying to understand why the game was banned, but I don't think it should start with us. But I think it should be the product of critics and audience looking at the game, understanding the game, understanding the current political climate, understanding what is approved and not approved on Steam, and trying to understand what is going on and what the processes are, and what should happen to change those processes.

A horse lies in a wheelbarrow in Horses.

I’ve read in your statements that this is likely going to be the last game for the studio. Is this still the case?

Very likely. The trajectory that we're seeing now, as we discussed before, in sales, it looks like we might be able to pay back the people who have lent us the money and pay off the debt. But it's unlikely that will give us enough money to actually produce something new at this point — because, keep in mind, because of the whole situation, we had to stop development halfway through the game. And at the same time, Valve not giving us Steam Keys for Saturnalia meant we couldn't sell it through bundles in a way that would have given us the kind of cash flow that we needed to start new projects.[Santa Ragione states that Valve denied requests for keys for their previous game, Saturnalia, without specific criteria.]

The trajectory of sales that we're seeing right now doesn't look like it's gonna make it easy for us to kickstart the whole thing again and invest, at least in the way that we've done this in the past, [which] was always self production first, by investing all of our money that we made in previous games in the new game. Right now we would need to sell more than we're currently selling, or have a big partner come in and be like, hey, actually, we're gonna fund your next game. It hasn't happened yet. It could still happen. To give you a completely honest answer, it still looks like we might not be able to do a new thing for now. But certainly we will be able to pay our debts. So that's a fantastic improvement that makes our lives and the lives of people who have collaborated with the studio much, much easier, much less stressful.

If this is the last game that you make, what is the legacy that you want to leave behind, as a studio?

I'm really proud. When you look at the eight games that we made — I'm saying eight because I also include our first game, which was a board game called Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space — you can see trajectories. You can see themes. You can see a path in visual experimentation. And it feels to me like a cohesive, significant body of work that we can be very proud of. And I think for people that will look at it even after the studio closes or freezes, definitely it would be meaningful, especially to those who want to make experimental games. I think it's cool to have this little system of experiments that talk about a specific place in a specific time and that are kind of wild.

I'm happy that we haven't made big compromises in the stuff that we make — and this is one of the critiques that we received with Horses’ ban, and with our previous games as well: “Well, what did you imagine would happen with the kind of games that you've made?” And I understand, I know that we never made safe choices, we never sat down and thought, “What is the next thing that we can make so that we can make 100% sure that the studio is healthy and that we're making money and that we're being successful?” And so we have responsibility for the direction that everything has gone, except for the Steam ban. Because I think, over these 15 years, we have proven that this way of approaching games, even if it was dangerous, it was sustainable. But if you take away 75% of the market, it stops being sustainable. So I'm happy that there is that legacy out there, and that it can be inspiring for other people.

For the people who haven't played Horses yet, why should they play this game, without thinking about the controversy and all that stuff?

I think it does a lot of new, interesting things with the way the story is conveyed, with the way the characters interact with you. The importance of close-ups and facial animations, the way it uses picture-in-picture, superimposition, showing your interactions and interesting things in the world, the way it splices full motion video inside interaction, it always brings you in and out of how realistic and unrealistic the situation is.

I think it's interesting because it does comedy and horror at the same time, and it does really investigate the grotesque, and make you think about why you're laughing at what you are laughing at, and it explores the feeling of discomfort and guilt, and submission. And I think all of these things make for a very novel experience that, especially for a video game, is quite unique. Right now, I don't think you can easily find them in other games.

So my recommendation would be, if you're the kind of player that wants to try something that makes you feel new things and think about new things and think about new ways in which this medium could be used, you could do much worse than Horses.

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