Nexon is suing Dark and Darker developer Ironmace Games over "copyright infringement"
Ironmace Games recently encouraged its players to torrent the game.
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Dark and Darker developer Ironmace is now being sued by Nexon over "copyright infringement," in the latest update of this bumpy journey.
This comes from Escape from Tarkov streamer and content creator Onepeg, who shared that the lawsuit had been filed by Nexon last Friday (April 14), alleging copyright infringement over Dark and Darker. To catch you up to speed quickly, Dark and Darker was pulled from Steam last month due to a cease and desist from Nexon, as it believes that Ironmace Games has been using stolen assets and code to developer Dark and Darker. This belief comes from the fact that Ironmace's founder Terence Park, and another developer Ju-Hyun Choi previously worked at Nexon on an apparently similar fantasy game codenamed P3 between 2020-2021.
Nexon has accused Choi of stealing assets while working there, and that in turn Dark and Darker was developed with them. Now, thanks to Onepeg, it has become apparent that this has escalated to Nexon filing a lawsuit against Ironmace. According to the lawsuit, both Choi and Park would have signed a "one-year-non-compete clause," with Nexon as part of their employee agreement, which "prevents employees from working in the same line of business that could potentially infringe on Nexon's trade secrets, without Nexon's prior consent."
Nexon is claiming that the "defendants stole P3 source code, audiovisual, and other materials that Nexon developed." As part of the lawsuit, Nexon is seeking monetary compensation for P3's developmental costs, and is also seeking to stop development and distribution of Dark and Darker. "Condoning the Defendants' conduct would threaten Nexon, the video game industry, and all of the consumers who enjoy playing sophisticated video games," the lawsuit notes.
"Video game developers would not be able to invest years' worth of person-hours in developing video games if their employees could simply transfer their employer's project files to their own personal servers and start a new company."
Last week, Ironmace Games encouraged Dark and Darker players to torrent the game in order to conduct the game's next alpha test.