Dark and Darker, the upcoming medieval extraction shooter that saw more than concurrent 100,000 players during its most recent playtest, has been pulled from Steam following a DMCA takedown and cease and desist notice issued by Korean gaming giant Nexon.
It’s the latest escalation in a legal battle between indie developer Ironmace and Nexon over the origins of Dark and Darker. Nexon claims that Dark and Darker uses stolen code and assets from a similar-looking Nexon project called P3 that was eventually scrapped, a project many members of Ironmace formerly worked on. Ironmace denies those accusations and has insisted that Dark and Darker was built from the ground up.
Nexon in its takedown notice cites that Ironmace is making “unauthorized use of Nexon’s trade secrets and copyrighted material,” and that based on its own investigation, is using “source codes, art resources, build files, and other company intellectual property.” The notice also takes aim at a former Nexon employee and the former team lead for project P3, who now works for Ironmace. Nexon confirms that the employee in question was “disciplined and terminated” for storing code and assets related to P3 on a personal server in July 2021, and was later sued by Nexon over the issue. That lawsuit is still ongoing.