Did you watch the game trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYewjNYxV-8 It's not a sex thing.

Did you watch the game trailer? Are you really saying this is pony play fetishism? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYewjNYxV-8 The equivalent here is the idea that something became wrong because it's "young child" and "naked man". It's literally the same discussion I saw in that forum about My Neighbor Totoro, because, again: moralists see nudity and think it can only represent sex

puritan bullshit all up and down this thread, and bronies protesting too much i'll get it from https://www.gog.com/en/game/horses

It really feels like some important piece of information is missing from this article. The whole thing is just the dramatised opinions of the guy who’s game got banned, and it’s clear that he thinks very highly of himself: > And while Horses won't be launching on consoles due to porting costs, Pietro says the console makers who've seen Horses have said they'd be "happy to have the game on \[their] platform" > "We had multiple publishers actively coming to us," explains Pietro, "and be like, 'Hey, we want to make this game.'" Looking at the game trailer and stills, I do not believe that this game was the talk of console-town or a publishing darling. It’s a rough as hell indie game about abusing humans with intentionally sexual imagery (I don’t believe him when he says the game is not sexual either, the trailer features people dressed as horses, followed by a shot of real-life horses fucking). If the game was so beloved by consoles, you would think that the “world’s best indie studio” could scrape together a few investors to pay for porting. Their other games have console releases. Where’s the love for the horse themed snuff game on Switch 2? This is a misleading article implying that the poor devs have had their game ripped from them: > And nearly 18 months on, the studio still isn't certain what triggered the ban. Except Valve explained in their response: > 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. Your game crossed lines that Valve has decided are too far for them. You changed the girl into a woman in later builds, but the application YOU submitted showed that there was consideration made in putting a small child into your horse-bdsm-murder game in a sexually suggestive manner. Valve cannot confirm that the rest of your game isn’t going to steer back in that direction, and has made a choice based on the information they have. They do not owe every dev a personalised response when their game is banned for exploiting minors. The game is going to be on GoG, Epic, Humble, and Itch.io. This dev is chucking a public tanty because he’s not allowed on Steam. This is 100% just a marketing ploy to drum up sympathy and push sales on other storefronts. No doubt a future trailer will contain the phrase “The game that was too scary for Steam is now available on Epic!” or some such.

Of course it was Santa Ragione. Met one of the founders years ago, acted like he had discovered the wheel and hot water himself when all he did was come up with Mirrormoon, which while good is anything but the smash hit he was pretending it was, it just happened to be the most successful italian indie game at the time of, like maybe 3 of them? These guys are pathologically auteur, and from everything I've seen of them, think they're way smarter than they actually are.

> the fact that valve is in such a dominant position that them refusing to sell a game can mean not only the game’s failure, but the shutdown of the studio making it, There are games exclusive to Epic that do just fine. There are games on itch and GoG that are doing just fine. If Steam not hosting your game causes your studio to shut down, it's not because Steam is being some unreasonable gatekeeper. It's because you're making something that there isn't any market for, or so little of a market that your only hope is to get it visible to as many people as possible so the tiny fraction of them that are interested can keep you afloat.

But they aren't tied to a store? When you download a game from Steam, it's just an executable on your box. You could put it on a hard drive and move it wherever you wanted. You don't have to launch games you bought with Steam through Steam. They aren't streamed. They are saved locally to your computer. You can only *download* it from that store, sure, but that's not apples to apples. If I buy a game from GameStop, they won't give me another copy for free, just cause I threw away the copy they gave me. Once you download the game, that's what they sold you, and it's notionally your responsibility to keep track of it. Them allowing you to keep downloading new copies forever isn't strictly necessary, and costs them money every time you do it. And if you can run the games you downloaded without Steam, all you're saying is "there should be other places to buy your games." But there are. Those exist. Less people use them, sure, but what do you propose? Kill Steam because too many people use it to buy their games? Legislate that people are required to shop at other stores?

well, many games are tied to the steam client (through the steam runtimes, steam DRM, steam input, needing a steam account for online play...). for most games, no, you can't just take the executable and do whatever you want with it. you'll need the steam client, and this creates a lock-in effect. because you need steam open to play all your steam games, you won't look elsewhere for games, and you won't see games not on steam, unless they're big enough. imo, the solution to this is to break the lock-in, have interoperability between clients. there's no good reason why cross-play between steam and GOG, for example, is an exception and not the norm. there's no good reason why the steam client is required for so many games, there should be offline installers. there's no good reason why steam input only works with the steam client. part of the reason why proton is so amazing is that it's open-source, other steam technologies should be the same!

> You might not immediately recognise the name Santa Ragione Because you clickbait vultures don't use proper nouns in your goddamn headlines?

> There are games exclusive to Epic that do just fine. Alan Wake 2 took an entire year to become profitable. It's because the one store everyone uses didn't carry it.

Yeah, it's a monopoly. That's not a value judgement. It's not calling them evil or criminal or anything. It is a necessary recognition of their market position. I.e. - they have competitors, but those competitors *do not matter.*

>You might not immediately recognise the name Santa Ragione, but the independent Italian studio has been creating boundary pushing, award-winning games for over a decade and a half now. Award winning, best indie game studio yet the name is unrecognisable...? It's pretty fishy just from the beginning of the article. I checked their game, some are not well received, and their latest game have only 92 reviews on Steam. Not good, seems like the studio is already on their way out and he believe Horses gonna save the studio. But if you look at the game https://youtu.be/JYewjNYxV-8 It's an asset flip niche horror game, it's not gonna save the studio. So what left is the dev trying to spin a sob story to hopefully rile up the anti-steam crowd to get some pity sales.

Sure, many games are tied to various Steam services, but that's by the choice of the games developer. Steam offers various built in services that game devs can choose to use if they want. It's not like it's some kind of requirement. You might as well complain that game devs use Windows binaries, locking their games to only run on Windows. Sure, I prefer it when they target other platforms, but that's 1000% not Microsoft's fault that the dev chose to dev for their platform. I'm not mad at Microsoft for so many games being Windows only. I'm mad at the devs. And games that build themselves around Steam services are *of course* going to be tied to Steam. That's a choice the devs made. If they wanted their game to run without needing the Steam client, they trivially could have built it that way. They just would have had to either reimplement all those Steam features themselves, or done without. And if people want those Steam features, every store client who wants to run those games would have to implement those features in an interoperable way. It's easy to say "have interoperability between clients," but that's glossing over the potentially thousands of dev hours required to implement all of the features needed. And that's assuming they could all agree on a spec. And to your final point about being open source. First, it gives very "any musician who gets paid is a sellout" energy. But more than that, it doesn't actually solve the problem you have. Even if Steam open sourced their tooling, that doesn't mean other players in the space could integrate it. Steam has grown organically for the past 30yrs, and trying to extricate the deep inner bits and then graft them on to your own solution isn't as easy as it sounds.

Satisfactory made $11 million in the first year when it was exclusive to Epic (and not available on "the one store everybody uses").

I understand that this is a problem for the studio, but no one would expect Disney to distribute a David Cronenberg movie. Steam is THE mainstream distribution platform for games, and for that they are already pretty open for weird shit. It's this weird american free speech thing only for video games: "I'm allowed to make it so you have to sell it!". No?

Exceptions mean there's no rule, yeah? Minecraft, therefore, 90% marketshare doesn't matter.

Their previous game seems like a proper hand-drawn stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqDalFNDdAw

> Exceptions mean there's no rule, yeah? 1) when you're arguing that it's impossible for a game to make a profit without Steam, yes 2) my post was in reply to you listing a single game that wasn't profitable for a year and blaming that on it not being on Steam. If my example is not a valid argument then you shouldn't have argued that way in the first place.

> they have competitors So not a monopoly.

Absolute monopolies are fiction. Standard Oil only ever controlled 85% of America's oil. Monopoly is when your competition does not matter - not when it does not exist. There will always be *someone* competing with you. But if I open Mindbleach's Video Emporium and move six units per quarter, the impact on Steam is approximately dick. So is Epic's.