Over the last couple of years, we’ve been covering the seemingly endless lawsuit drama between Nexon and Ironmace over Dark and Darker. Nexon accused Dark and Darker studio Ironmace of essentially ripping off Nexon’s Project P3, a credible allegation as Ironmace was headed up by former Project P3 developers who’d left Nexon.
There followed a drawn-out legal spat between the companies as Nexon got Dark and Darker taken off Steam, served Ironmace with a C&D, prompted police to raid Ironmace’s studios, and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. Ironmace retaliated with accusations of its own and got the game into early access anyway after Korean courts dismissed the preliminary injunction blocking live service.
The courts weren’t finished, however, and in spite of Ironmace’s claims of innocence, a Seoul Central District Court has still sided with Nexon on at least one of the claims. While finding Ironmace hadn’t infringed on Nexon’s copyright, it did determine that it was liable for violating Nexon’s trade secrets. Ironmace must now pay Nexon 8.5B KRW (around $6M US).
We poked a nose into Ironmace’s Discord channel to see if it had a statement, only to find that the devs are dealing with a DDOS attack that players are absurdly blaming on Nexon.
