The headline-making project drew attention not only from gamers but also from legal teams.
Misery launched on Steam in late October. The survival game set in the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe quickly gained traction.
However, the title was recently pulled from sale on Steam after Valve removed its store page. The developer explained that this followed a complaint from a rights holder.
A DMCA strike (copyright infringement) was issued by GSC Game World:
This Wednesday we received a letter from GSC’s legal team outlining their claims in detail, and we were able to resolve the misunderstanding. We still maintain that MISERY does not infringe any of GSC’s IP rights related to the world, setting, characters, or similar elements, as alleged in the initial complaint.
The author of Misery stated that “there were indeed two issues we were unaware of at the time of the strike, and which were not listed in the DMCA notice.”
1.) A helicopter model in the files — it ended up in the project by accident but was never used.
MISERY evolved from non-commercial projects developed over roughly four years, during which the developer learned using asset packs. In early 2025 one of those training projects began to take shape as MISERY. That helicopter model accidentally remained among the resources, but it was NEVER used in the game and players NEVER saw it.
2.) Guitar tracks — some licensed GSC pieces unintentionally made their way into the game:
GSC used well-known folk songs as guitar melodies, for example “Tsyganochka.” A friend of the developer recorded original cover versions of some songs for MISERY, and those covers were used in the game. NO ORIGINAL FILES FROM GSC GAMES WERE USED. However, it turned out that some (not all) of these pieces had been specifically composed for or exclusively licensed by GSC, and they asked us to remove them — which we did immediately.
The creator of Misery stresses: “no assets from GSC games were used.”
Source: iXBT.games