Misery was released on Steam at the end of October. The survival game in a nuclear disaster zone quickly became very popular.
However, the game was recently removed from sale on Steam, and Valve deleted its page. The developer explained that this happened after a complaint from the copyright holder.
The DMCA strike ("copyright infringement") came from GSC Game World* (hereinafter referred to as GSC):
This Wednesday, we received a letter from GSC's legal team detailing their claims, and we were able to resolve the misunderstanding. We remain confident that MISERY does not infringe any GSC IP rights related to the world, setting, characters, etc., as claimed in the original complaint.
The author of Misery said that "there were indeed two issues that we were not aware of at the time of the strike, and that were not mentioned in the DMCA notice."
1.) The helicopter model in the files - it accidentally got into the game, but was not used.
MISERY is a development of non-commercial projects that lasted about 4 years, during which the developer learned using asset packs. In early 2025, one of the training projects began to take shape into MISERY. This helicopter model accidentally remained in the resources, but it was NEVER used in the game, and players NEVER saw it.
2.) Guitar songs - some licensed GSC tracks unintentionally made it into the game:
GSC used popular folk songs as guitar melodies, such as "Gypsy". A friend of the developer recorded original covers of some songs for MISERY, and they were used in the game. NO ORIGINAL FILES FROM GSC GAMES WERE USED. However, it turned out that some (not all!) of these songs were specifically written or exclusively licensed by GSC, and they asked us to remove them, which we did immediately.
The creator of Misery emphasizes: "no resources from GSC games were used."
- * — The activities of GSC Game World are recognized as undesirable in the Russian Federation