Dark and Darker, apart from being one of the most curious indies of recent times, emerged at the end of 2022 as one of the most promising games on the recent scene. The bet multiplayer roguelike has attracted a good list of onlookers after its latest free trial, but also voices clamoring for a plagiarism of another korean game.
According to the US portal PcGamer, the name Dark and Darker appeared on February 16 on the Korean portal This is Game along with words like “plagiarism” or “theft”. There it was announced that the IRONMACE study stole assets and the code of a unfinished project under the name of P3to the South Korean studio Nexon.
Some attacks on the IRONMACE studio that have not gone unanswered. The parents of Dark and Darker claim not to have used any stolen code for their debut. “Our code was built from scratch. Most of our assets are purchased on the Unreal marketplace. All other assets and all game design documents were created in-house. As far as we know, you can’t copyright a genre.”
Although the similarities that PcGamer shares are obvious, the situation is somewhat more complex. The IRONMACE team is made up, in part, of former Nexon employees who left the South Korean studio in 2021 when it changed course and embarked on P7, a survival game.
P3, at that time, came to nothing and once IRONMACE was founded that same year, the bases of that P3 “as a Dark and Darker prototype“, without incurring in theft or misappropriation of other people’s assets. However, those words do not please the Nexon studio.
The South Koreans claim that the pillars of Dark and Darker were formed based on information theft while those former Nexon employees were still working on P3, so yes they stole parts of the game despite the fact that it was never released as such. For this reason, the team will not give up in its efforts to prove said theft and threatens to resort to the “Law for the Protection of Trade Secrets and Unfair Competition” to attack Dark and Darker.
At the moment, the end of this dispute is far from over. Although the accusation is serious, IRONMACE believes it can handle it in privatealthough they have already advanced that they will defend themselves in court if the case reaches the majors.
