Dark and Darker – Police raid studio of developer Ironmace

It seemed that Dark and Darker was actually on a good path. The dungeon crawler is based on a mix of fantasy setting with barbarians, rogues and mages and Escape from Tarkov elements, where you have to bring your loot out of the dungeon alive at the end of a game round.

However, after the successful playtests and the great popularity, the development studio Ironmace now has legal problems.

What happened?

According to Yonhap News, there has already been a police search at the indie studio’s headquarters. The reason is the accusation by publisher giant Nexon, which accuses the studio of data theft.
Many of the studio’s employees – including CEO Seung-ha Park – had previously worked as developers at Nexon.

Allegedly, the Ironmace CEO leaked game files and assets from a game in development during this time and shortly thereafter resigned from Nexon along with a large portion of Project P3’s development team.
This then led to Nexon being forced to shut down the game.

In fact, there are probably some clear parallels between Project P3 and Dark and Darker. This is said to be due to the fact that it is based on the stolen files – and as a result, publisher Nexon has already launched an unfair competition charge against Ironmace in 2021.

However, the indie developer studio defends itself against these accusations, saying that they either bought and/or customized all of Dark and Darker’s assets from the Unreal Store or created them entirely themselves.
Ironmace also stated that it would be difficult to call an entire game genre its intellectual property.

What’s happening next?

As Yonhab News further reported, the search took place on March 8, 2023 at Ironmace Studios’ headquarters, located in the South Korean city of Seongnam. Officials seized data there, which is now being compared to Nexon’s Project P3 data.

After that, it will probably be decided how to proceed legally in this matter.

Developers confident

The developers of Dark and Darker, however, remain confident. The current legal dispute should not have a negative impact on the development of the game, and the final playtest is still planned for next April.

After that, Dark and Darker is supposed to enter Early Access on Steam.

Whether this will happen or whether the legal disputes with Nexon will have more of an impact than expected remains to be seen.