The ongoing battle betweenDark and Darkerstudio Ironmace and Korean publisher Nexon has had another interesting development, with a $500,000 GoFundMe campaign meant to supportDark and Darker’s legal battle being deleted within an hour of its creation. Although the GoFundMe page was deleted, Ironmace doesn’t appear to be giving up in its struggle againstNexon.
The legal drama between Korean studio Ironmace and Nexon can be traced back to August 2021, when a Nexon employee known as “Leader A” was caught leaking assets for a project with the working title “P3”. Leader A was fired from Nexon as a consequence, and a later investigation showed that they had leaked thousands of the project’s files to an external server. Soon after, members of the P3 team quit Nexon to join Ironmace in developingDark and Darkeralongside Leader A. Nexon contends thatDark and Darkerhas been built on stolen assetsfrom P3, which has resulted in legal action and even a police raid on Ironmace’s studio.
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An Ironmace admin named Luci onDark and Darker’s Discord server released an open letter and acknowledged that the team wasn’t aware they’d be making the post, which called for the community to supportIronmace’s legal battlethrough a GoFundMe campaign. The letter said that Nexon essentially plans to “bleed [Ironmace] dry” with expensive court fees and that Nexon even named a tutorial boss in its latest MMORPG “Leader of the Silver Sun - Terence” to mock the Ironmace developer. The campaign earned upwards of $46,000 toward its $500,000 goal in under an hour before it was taken down.
Ironmace admin Graysun commented on the situation, confirming that the GoFundMe campaign was launched “without approval due to a passionate member of the team taking matters into his own hands.” Ironmace appears to be planning another GoFundMe in the future, as Graysun told fans to look out for a future announcement detailing how the GoFundMe will be handled. SinceDark and Darkerhas been removed from Steam, Ironmace is going to have to rely on crowdfunding if the studio is to have any chance at surviving an expensive legal battle with a firm as large as Nexon, which publishes major titles likeMaple Story,Mabinogi, and dozens of others.
Ironmace has issued a statementcalling the allegations “baseless,” and that any resemblance to the Nexon project is due to the game’s nature as a “basic dungeon crawler.” Nexon has suggested thatDark and Darkercouldn’t possibly have been developed as quickly as it was, which Ironmace countered by pointing to the game’s heavy use of store-bought assets.
Dark and Darkerhas been released on PC but is currently unavailable.
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