Devs of Steam Hit Dark and Darker Accused of Stealing Assets [UPDATE]
After the recent hacking attack, another blow has fallen on the developers of Dark and Darker. This time IRONMACE has to face accusations of asset theft from a Korean developer.
Update
Terence Seung-ha, president of IRONMACE, the studio responsible for Dark and Darker, posted a message on the game's Discord channel, in which he denied the allegations described below. The published statement reads:
"Our code was built from the ground up. Most of our resources were purchased on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. All other resources and game design documents were created in-house. This has already been audited by an external agency. As far as we know, a game genre cannot be copyrighted. As for the lawsuit, we believe that this is a separate private issue that was raised by one of our team members. No lawsuit has been filed against IRONMACE."
According to Seung-ha, rumors of a lawsuit were "probably sparked by a third party." According to the chairman, not all the people who worked on P3 at Nexon, left to help establish IRONMACE. As a result, the sudden success of Dark and Darker may have aroused jealousy in them, which in turn led to such and not other decisions.
Original message (Feb. 17, 2023)
Still under development, Dark and Darker has already managed to won the hearts of players on Steam. The game by IRONMACE has seen several rounds of playtests on Valve's platform, each time attracting a growing audience.
Dark and Darker may face an uphill battle
Praised by the community, the dungeon crawler has been facing a number of problems recently. First, during the recent testing, the game's infrastructure was attacked by hackers, which prevented players from logging into the servers.
Now, in turn, the developers of Dark and Darker have to defend themselves against serious accusations. This is because it has been suggested that in the game by IRONMACE illegally used assets belonging to another developer.
This information was first reported by Korean website This Is Game, which informed that some of the materials used in Dark and Darker may be owned by studio Nexon.
The accusations appear to be serious
The stolen assets, according to This Is Game, allegedly come from Nexon's project with the working name "P3," which was announced in 2021. Still in the early stages of work, the game underwent a transformation at one time, changing its name to "P7." This, in turn, was to lead to the dismissal of several employees.
According to Nexon's vice president Dae-Hwon Kim (via mxdwn.com), the fired employees are currently developers at IRONMACE, who were said to have "illegally used materials and assets that were being worked on at Nexon."
Interestingly, mxdwn.com points to an interesting note contained on the official website of IRONMACE, which reads:
"We have seen with our own eyes how game corporations sell their souls for easy money. We are disappointed to see more and more exploitative practices, turning games into casinos instead of bringing joy to the players."
For now, we don't know if Nexon will take legal action against IRONMACE. The developers of Dark and Darker have not yet addressed This Is Game's article. All we know is that they intend to focus on developing the game. On the official discord channel of the brand users are discussing the matter, but so far have not seen a response from the developers.
Dark and Darker is scheduled to debut in early access on Steam in late April or early May, this year. The release of the full version, on the other hand, is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2023.
