Epic Games Store decides “at the last minute” to not distribute Horses

Epic Games Store is the most recent on-line storefront to withdraw assist for the provocative indie recreation, Horses.

In a statement posted to social media, developer Santa Ragione confirmed Epic Games Store determined “at the last minute not to distribute the game,” regardless of “having previously approved a release build.”

Last week, Italian developer Santa Ragione claimed in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz that it may face closure after Valve mentioned it might not host its upcoming horror title Horses on Steam. The studio says that this determination has meant it’s unable to achieve the largest viewers for PC and thus is unlikely to recoup the mission’s improvement prices.

In an announcement to GamesIndustry.biz on the time, Valve mentioned: “We reviewed the game back in 2023. At that time, the developer indicated with their release date in Steamworks that they planned to release a few months later. Based on content in the store page, we told the developer we would need to review the build itself. This happens sometimes if content on the store page causes concern that the game itself might not fall within our guidelines.

“After our team played through the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines. A short while later, the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed that extensively and communicated to the developer our final decision that we were not going to ship the game on Steam.”

Now it appears Epic Games Store has adopted go well with, telling Santa Ragione:

“We are unable to distribute Horses on the Epic Games Store because our review found violations of the Epic Games Store Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies. The ‘Inappropriate Content’ policy prohibits content which “contains explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior or not appropriately labeled, rated, or age-gated.” The ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policy prohibits content that promotes abuse and animal abuse. This content is prohibited by our Guidelines and cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store.

“Additionally, after we [Epic] crammed out the IARC Questionnaire based mostly on the content material that we reviewed, it acquired an Adult Only (AO) ranking. Products with AO scores can’t be distributed on the Epic Games Store (the one exception is for merchandise in instances the place an AO ranking was utilized solely because of the utilization of blockchain or NFT know-how).”

Santa Ragione was then provided the possibility to both modify the sport and resubmit it for evaluation, or enchantment the choice.

The developer said it “immediately appealed their decision through all suggested channels” and disputed claims that the sport accommodates specific or frequent depictions of sexual conduct, and “importantly reminded Epic that we filled out and completed IARC as part of their submission process more than five weeks before release and did NOT receive an AO rating.”

“We received a PEGI 18 and an ESRB M rating, as currently displayed on the Horses, coming soon page on the Epic Games Store,” the developer added.

Despite interesting, EGS mentioned it had reviewed the enchantment “and found the original decision was appropriately applied and will remain in place.”

CD Projekt’s GOG platform has come out in assist of Horses.