It’s Official – Dark and Darker Legal Drama Expands to US. A few weeks after the feud went public, South Korean game publisher Nexon is suing Ironmace for copyright infringement. Nexon is seeking a jury trial and has assembled a team of lawyers to acquire Ironmace, with two superiors named individually in the lawsuit.
This was booted up on Steam due to initial complaints about copyright infringement from Nexon, just as Ironmace is releasing playtests for Dark and Darker via torrent. Ironmace has yet to publicly respond to this latest move, but that doesn’t seem to stop the developers from continuing Dark and Darker’s open beta.
In the suit, Nexon is seeking monetary damages from Ironmace for alleged copyright infringement, as well as forcing Dark and Darker to cease development and public distribution. The amount the company is asking is to compensate for money lost while developing its own game, codenamed P3, which Ironmace stole to make Dark and Darker.
All pages of the lawsuit were accessed by YouTuber Onepeg, who watched Dark and Darker closely.
The lawsuit reads, “To tolerate the defendant’s conduct threatens Nexon, the video game industry, and all consumers who enjoy sophisticated video games.” “Video game developers wouldn’t be able to invest years of man-hours into video game development if only their employees could transfer their employer’s project files to their personal servers and start a new company.”
Joo-Hyun Choi and Seung-Ha Park, two Iron Mace employees directly named in the lawsuit, are former Nexon employees. Nexon claims that this is how they got their hands on the source code and other assets, and used it in Dark and Darker. There are also allegations that while Choi was working with the publisher, he tried to convince other Nexon employees to leave and join Iron Mace.
There’s more to the lawsuit, and we didn’t even make the claim that Dark and Darker developers signed one-year non-compete contracts when they were at Nexon. However, it’s unclear how Ironmace will respond. Despite news of the lawsuit circulating in the fan base and on the Dark and Darker Discord servers, the defendants have not responded publicly to this development. Although this is very likely under the guidance of its own legal counsel. Whether it gets far enough to get the jury trial Nexon demands remains to be seen.