The Ban On Indie Horror Game Horses Has Helped Sales, But Not As Much As You’d Think
Santa Ragione 
Johnny Flores Jr. is a News Editor at TheGamer. He joined the team in 2024, and is focused on bringing the latest news to readers in a fun and easily digestible format. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Johnny owns a B.A. in Journalism and minor in Sports Media Studies. California born and raised, you can often find Johnny enjoying the sunshine and In-N-Out. When not gaming or writing news, Johnny can be found playing with his two male chihuahuas, Akira and August, whom he affectionately calls his sons.
Yet, despite the game seemingly going viral overnight, it seems that the impact of word-of-mouth and it being in headlines has done very little to help the title from Santa Ragione and Italian filmmaker and game director, Andrea Lucco Borlera, turn a profit.
Janky indie games have the best scares money can buy – and it’s not even a lot of money.
Virality Can Only Take You So Far When Steam Is As Popular As It Is
In a new interview with The Verge, studio co-founder and Horses producer, Pietro Righi Riva, discussed some of the fallout following the game’s overnight news headlines and subsequent release, namely if any of it helped make the title profitable. In short, no, not really.
“I’m relieved because, with all this attention, I’m probably going to be able to give back most of the money [roughly half of $100,000] that I had to borrow,” the producer said. “But we’re not out of the [woods] yet, no.”
Ahead of its release, in an FAQ dedicated to sharing its side of the story, Santa Ragione noted that $100,000 was inveseted into the game’s development, of which half came from friends. At the time, the studio acknowledged that without a release on Steam, recouping any of that money would be nearly impossible.
Still, given that the game stood to probably make nothing after its ban, especially given how much smaller these storefronts fare compared to Steam, the viralness of its story did help somewhat.
“There is no way the same kind of interest would have happened,” he added.
Even so, a release on Steam is ultimately the most beneficial thing from a financial and crowd standpoint, and the team is still disappointed that things ended the way they did.
“Even with all the publicity, all the reporting, all the reviews, everything else,” he said, “this still does not compare to the kind of audience we would have on Steam.”
That the studio was even able to get some of the money back and pay those people is good to hear, but it is worth wondering just how much more money they could’ve generated had Steam reconsidered its stance. Maybe Horses wouldn’t have gone viral, but given how Steam users have turned inconspicuous titles into overnight successes before, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
It’s been two decades since Perfect Dark Zero launched alongside the Xbox 360.
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