TECH NEWS – After Santa Ragione posted a critical opinion about Epic Games on Bluesky, the company has now responded to the studio’s statement.
We wrote about what the Italian studio had to say yesterday, so we won’t go into that again. However, as we mentioned yesterday, Horses is intentionally quite shocking. The story takes place on a farm where the horses are actually naked humans who wear horse masks at all times and are treated like animals. They are fed like animals, kept in stables, forced to plow, raced, and ridden. Horses is presented in a dark, black-and-white psychological horror style. Players are forced to participate in daily routines and increasingly disturbing tasks that normalize this ongoing dehumanization. The game features sexual violence, mutilation, and torture. The symbolic horses are punished with beatings and castration if they have sex with each other.
Epic Games‘ communications director, Brian Sharon, sent WCCFTech the company’s official response to Santa Ragione‘s criticism: “Our team played the game and found that it violates the Epic Games Store’s Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies. We conducted a secondary review by completing the ratings questionnaire for the game ourselves, and the content received an Adults Only (AO) rating, which we do not permit on the Store. Since this wasn’t an official submission, we don’t have a certificate to share with the team. We did, however, provide the developers with context regarding the policies they violated. When they appealed, we reviewed the content again and informed them that the decision was appropriately applied and would remain in place.”
As we mentioned yesterday, Horses has now been removed from the Epic Games Store, as well as from Steam. However, it is still available on GOG, itch.io, and the Humble Store. At least we can buy it DRM-free on GOG, which is always a good thing. However, as Santa Ragione also said, full playthroughs are still available on Twitch and YouTube. So why should it be banned?
Source: WCCFTech
