The Nexon lawsuit has not yet been resolved, and is the likely barrier to Dark and Darker coming back to Dark And Darker Gold Steam. The game publishing giant alleged that Ironmace's founders, former Nexon employees, used copyrighted work from a cancelled Nexon project in the creation of Dark and Darker.
Ironmace has denied that allegation, and Park reiterated that denial today. "We built Dark and Darker from the ground up here at Ironmace and stand by our work," Park told PC Gamer in response to a question about Nexon's claims. Dark and Darker may be the punk hero of PC gaming this year
It's been kicked off Steam and released an official torrent all to "win back the hearts of gamers." Dark and Darker concept art - a character opens a chest of gold loot while two others celebrate
It's been a cursed couple months for the developers of dungeon crawling PvP extraction game Dark and Darker: They've endured a DMCA takedown, a police raid, DDOS attacks, and had to distribute a playtest entirely by torrent links. The developers have now defied Nexon, Steam, Discord, and Twitter just to get players into their free playtest, which is some exceptionally underdog behavior.
Dark and Darker's fourth alpha playtest in February was a surprise hit, pulling a peak of over 100,000 concurrent players as a Steam Next Fest demo. It was a great time to play in a party with friends, excellent fodder for clip compilations, RPG build theorists, PvP lovers, and finally gave me the non-FPS extraction game I've been needing.
After that high of highs, Dark and Darker has been in freefall for two months. Game publisher Nexon, former employer of two members of Ironmace, has accused the developers of stealing code and assets, which resulted in a police raid on the developer's South Korean office, removal of the game from Steam by DMCA takedown request, and cheap Dark And Darker Gold a short lived GoFundMe campaign to assist with the developer's expected legal defense fees.
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