Why Alchemy Factory Was Removed From Steam (2025)

What happened, in the developers’ own account

The statement D5 Copperhead and Gamirror Games posted on 23 December 2025 is the primary source, and it is short enough to follow step by step.

13 December 2025. Players noticed that “some music we added in Alchemy Factory Early Access version bore significant similarities to music from Jagex’s RuneScape.” At 8:14 PM Pacific that day the team removed the track, which had been “provided by a third artist”, in build 21179267 and apologised to Jagex and players on Reddit.

The same weekend. Update v0.4.1.3754 (20 December) caused crashes and save-file losses. The three-person team spent the following days on emergency fixes and two public posts, “We identified a crash issue” and “Temporary Alternative Solution for Players Experiencing Crashes.”

Friday evening. Valve forwarded a DMCA copyright complaint by email. In the developers’ words, the crash work “prevented us from promptly checking and replying” to it.

23 December 2025. The game was removed from Steam. “If you have already purchased the game, you can continue playing.”

26 December. A holiday update went out anyway (v0.4.1.3824, with Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese), with a note that the team still could not reach Valve over the holidays.

30 December 2025. “Alchemy Factory is back on Steam!”

What it was not

It was not a takedown over the game itself, its art, or its systems, and it was not a Steam policy action; it was a DMCA process that ran its course while nobody on the team answered the email. The developers framed it as a lesson: “As this is our first indie game, this incident has made us aware of the importance of copyright compliance in game development.”

The music since then

The soundtrack was reworked in stages: a batch of tracks was already remade for the Early Access build, five new BGM tracks and new machine sounds arrived in v0.5.4530 (June 2026), and the May 2026 update preview announced that Mikolai Stroinski, one of the composers of The Witcher 3, had written a new theme. Not everyone was happy: a 42-reply August 2026 thread titled “The new music..” mourns the demo’s tune, and a developer replied there that the BGM feedback was noted.

Why people still search for it

“Was Alchemy Factory removed from Steam?” is one of Google’s suggested questions on the game a year later, and “alchemy factory not on steam” and “is alchemy factory back on steam” still show up in autocomplete. The short answer for anyone landing here: it was off the store for one week in December 2025, it has been on sale since, and it left Early Access as Version 1.0 on 8 September 2026 with 200,000 copies sold.

Sources: “Some information about why Alchemy Factory was removed from Steam” (23 December 2025); “Merry Christmas! Alchemy Factory Holiday Update & Relisting Progress” (26 December 2025); “Alchemy Factory is back on Steam!” (30 December 2025); Update v0.4.1.3754 and the two crash posts (20 to 21 December 2025); May Update Preview (15 May 2026); v0.5.4530 notes (26 June 2026); Steam Discussions “The new music..” (27 August 2026).