Banned horror game Horses recoups costs through niche audience sales

Horses turned a storefront rejection into a narrow but real business case. Santa Ragione said the surreal horror game sold 30,000 copies worldwide and generated $100,000 in revenue, enough to begin recouping development costs after being banned on Steam and pulled from the Epic Games Store shortly before launch.

That matters because the numbers are not glamorous, but they are instructive. Santa Ragione, the Milan studio founded in 2010 by Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi, said roughly $30,000 went to director Andrea Lucco Borlera, about $62,000 went back to private funders, and about $8,000 remained with the studio. Earlier coverage put the studio about $42,000 short of covering its own development costs after the bans, a gap that shows how quickly distribution setbacks can reshape a project’s financial runway.

For Nintendo, the lesson is not about horror content so much as market access and cost discipline. A game can be blocked from one major channel, or even two, and still find an audience if the team has kept the budget tight and can reach committed buyers elsewhere. That is a useful benchmark for business teams weighing whether a niche project can survive on smaller-scale sales, for localization teams deciding whether a title has enough travel across regions, and for QA and compliance staff who know a release plan can change as quickly as a platform holder changes its mind.

Santa Ragione said Horses launched on GOG, itch.io and the Humble Store, a distribution mix that helped the game stay visible outside the biggest PC storefronts. The studio later added six languages in a final update, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, French and Russian, signaling a push to widen the audience after launch rather than before it. That kind of staged expansion is a reminder that discoverability does not end at release, especially for smaller teams without the cushion of a marquee platform slot.

The broader dispute also underlines how opaque platform enforcement can affect creative and commercial planning. Epic publicly disputed Santa Ragione’s claim that it had been ghosted and said it had provided context around the policies violated. Whether a team is building a Nintendo-published title or courting an outside partner, the practical question is the same: if a game is going to be confined to a niche, the budget, the launch plan and the compliance strategy all have to be built for that reality from the start.