A tectonic shift in the political climate has given rise to a sharp increase in authoritarian practices and policies and made 2025 an unprecedented and disconcerting year for censorship, including for the video game industry. In the face of outstanding pressure on the payment processors powering storefronts like Steam and Itch, thousands of games--largely pertaining to adult subject matter that was sexual in nature and labeled NSFW--were either removed or deindexed from those respective stores. Though the uproar around these removals died down with time--partly due to loss of momentum pressuring these stores to rescind the bans, partly because certain free games were eventually reindexed on Itch--the recent release of Santa Ragione's Horses has brought the conversation back for another round before year's end.That's because, once again, a title with a significant amount of adult content (seriously, Horses fits a lot of taboo material into a fairly brief runtime) has found itself in the crosshairs of the ongoing puritanical culture war that's raging throughout the country, as well as in the world of video games. And as it continues, the controversy around certain games and their subject matter begins to raise questions about artistic expression, who in this medium is allowed to discuss and prominently feature adult-oriented content, and what kind of conversations and explorations of these subjects will the corporate powers in control of the industry permit.Horses is a notable development in this ongoing controversy for several reasons, not the least of which is the preventative measures taken against it. Whereas the bulk of the censorship mentioned here came well after games were released and available to play, affecting many games that had already been listed on these stores for some time, Horses has been facing an uphill battle leading to its release on December 2.In the week preceding its launch, Santa Ragione published an FAQ explaining that Horses had already been banned on Steam, as well as outlining why the storefront might have made this decision. Why? According to Santa Ragione, the chief reason for Valve's response seems to stem from a review build of Horses back in 2023 and a back-and-forth between the game's publisher and Valve that resulted in Horses' ban before the game could even be finished or meaningfully altered. More specifically, the development team believed that a scene from the in-progress build, which featured a child riding on the shoulders of a naked woman, was Valve's biggest cause of concern. But as anyone who has actually played Horses can attest, the scene has been altered for the better, and now features a grown woman in the place of the little girl. The scene becomes stronger with this change largely due to the dialogue the player has with the woman, who calmly acknowledges the human-shaped horse in the room, making herself and her father knowingly complicit in the awful violence being enacted on the farm. The alteration also happens to clear up any suspicion that Horses ever featured a pornographic scene--even if the interaction in question was never sexual--with a child.Despite the ban, Santa Ragione still forged ahead and released the controversial title on December 2 across other digital storefronts, including the Epic Games Store, Itch, and GOG. In an unfortunate eleventh-hour reversal, EGS (through which a handful of reviewers had actually redeemed and played through Horses) removed the game from its storefront. A few days later, Humble briefly took down Horses from its store as well, before reinstating the game after reviewing it more closely.Suffice to say, the impact of these bans has irreparably harmed Horses and the publisher behind it, even if the controversy and noise around the game has drawn support and attention it might not have otherwise received.Horses' ban is just the latest in a concerning trend though. In the months since Valve first purged its store of a number of concerning NSFW games and simulations--ones that promoted "rape, incest, sexual torture, and child abuse" and that the organization Collective Shout reportedly applied pressure to Steam's payment processors in order to remove--it appears to also be increasingly clamping down on many current and future adult games that might broach similar themes. To that end, games which feature "mature themes," i.e. sexually explicit content, are no longer permitted in Steam's early access program, making it that much harder for independent developers who regularly explore these topics to have viable pathways to success (let alone visibility) in the medium. Despite the fact that the intent of this movement appeared to be ridding these stores of harmful bad actors, the consequences of it have rippled outwards in a way that threatens many developers, though it certainly isn't impacting everyone equally.HorsesPaired with the AA and AAA gaming space's reluctance to explore and address similar themes (with a few notable exceptions), the chilling effect of this wave of bans threatens to stunt the growth of the games industry, its creative forces, and the audience that engages with games. We are currently watching a digital storefront pick and choose who and what passes a purity test whose terms and requirements are largely nebulous, and policing what art gets to entertain and provoke us. If Horses' ban, which on Steam alone threatens to preclude it from "more than 75 percent of the PC gaming market," as well as the numerous developments around Steam's policies, are any indication, there is tremendous cause for concern about the future of artistry in games.Moreover, I'm concerned about what these enforcements have to say about what is permissible in these stores, and more importantly, who is allowed to do it. As Aftermath's Chris Person points out, there are games, even whole franchises, that feature similar themes and have gotten away with little to no scrutiny over their depictions. He writes: "If the invalidating content was slavery, then Final Fantasy XVI, Fallout: New Vegas, and Dragon Age: Origins would never be allowed to be sold. If torture is unallowed, then (Grand Theft Auto) V violates Epic's terms of service with 'By The Book,' a mission where Trevor tortures a guy by pulling his teeth out with pliers and electrocuting his nipples on behalf of the government. Americans understand and respect graphic violence, torture, and abuse as art, and on that front Horses is far less graphic than any 30 seconds in a recent Mortal Kombat game."The actual events of Horses are gnarly, and its content warnings should not be taken lightly, but it is not only tamer than the far cruder works from which it takes inspiration--chiefly the Italian film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom--but shows far more restraint in its depictions of violence than most M-rated games. The content Horses features, and the themes it uses these subjects to probe, are not exactly the stuff of children's books and fairy tales, so why is it and its potential audience being handled with kid gloves?The answer, as usual, seems to come down to some degree of clout and/or reputation. If you are too large to fail or deny--like a Grand Theft Auto game bound to sell millions of copies for the decade following its release--and replicate the same tepid and self-serving explorations of these adult subjects, then you can probably get away with being a game for adults by adults. In other words, games can be about sex so long as the player can romance and sleep with their in-game crush. Games can be about violence if the player is the one capable of committing outstandingly gratuitous and self-aggrandizing acts of violence or if they can reap the benefits of it. But you can only really be about either if you're sure to be a big seller, and you don't actually need to look much further than the 2025 Game Awards for proof of this trend, either.Larian Studios, the now beloved developer behind 2023's landmark game Baldur's Gate 3, recently unveiled its upcoming game, Divinity, in a boundary-pushing trailer that reveled in extremely photorealistic violence, gore, and depictions of brazen sexuality. In it, a man is strung up to be sacrificed in a pyre while cultists watch, self-flagellate, and engage in public orgies. As he catches fire, we watch his skin melt off and his gaunt figure be torn to shreds. A child, who at one point seems concerned about the violence and is shown tugging on her mother's dress, is then revealed to be yet another zealous onlooker of all the violence and seemingly crass displays of sex that we've all just witnessed. And while the whole thing has caused some stir and raised some eyebrows, Larian is far less likely to be condemned and have their game withheld from stores than Santa Ragione.The only clear distinguishing factor between these games and Horses seems to be that some of the above companies are too affluent (and their games are considered too profitable) for any of these stores and their creators to police. Santa Ragione and the likely hundreds of independent developers suffering at the whims of Steam's policy changes, aren't. Threatening one of the former would impact these stores' bottom lines. The latter likely won't.It seems the corporations in control of the games industry seem intent on infantilizing gaming audiences, and bottle-feeding them the "right" kind of mature games. Anything that falls outside those thinly defined parameters, set by the most influential and powerful figures in gaming, is now morally deviant. But in a medium increasingly dominated by the likes of Fortnite, PlayStation's growing crop of prestige bids, AI slop, and games that are actually harmful to kids, like Roblox, I desperately want games to also carve out a niche for avant-garde and otherwise deviant experiences. Games that push boundaries, raise questions, and give voice to uncomfortable notions and themes. Games that live up to the foundational tenets of art, even if I don't like or play them. Anything less is unbecoming of a field that constantly fights for a seat at the table of other artistic mediums, all of which have borne fruit far more boundary-pushing than anything found in Horses.There is a rot at the core of this issue that threatens to swallow the artistry of the medium whole. A rot that wants to paper over the uncomfortable and authentic tendencies of art that are often antithetical to the profit-driven motives of corporations. For the sake of this maturing field, a field which so desperately wants to be seen and treated as if it's grown, I hope that we can stymie its efforts. For Horses, for every NSFW and adult game wrongfully censored before it, and for any future deviants to come.