They created the viral RPG of 2022, they were accused of theft and visited by the police: the parents of Dark and Darker break their silence

If you’ve been paying attention to the most viral video games in recent months, Dark and Darker is more than likely familiar to you. The Dark Medieval Fantasy PvPvE Game ate Steam and Twitch during its alphas, but soon it has been seen with legal problems by the former company of its creators: Nexon. Today, this development team publicly defends itself against its former bosses.

A few weeks ago, we were talking about how Korea’s own police, the action-RPG’s home country, had gotten involved in the matter. The reason? Nexon accuses the game developers of theft and unfair competition. Alleging that the IRONMACE studio stole assets and code from an unfinished project, they are accused of having used these as the basis for Dark and Darker.

Since then, we had not seen any statements from the studio, but we did see how their still unfinished project had been removed from Steam. After this drastic measure, the independent team wanted to give your point of view prior legal advice from their representatives.

Through the game’s Discord, IRONMACE has put several points on the i’s by releasing two statements, a list of assets purchased for the development of Dark and Darker and the development logs of the same as a way of showing that everything was built from nothingwithout using bases that did not belong to them.

“We want to make it clear that these accusations are unfounded,” says the official statement. Nexon accuses one of the employees of having moved company assets to a private server without permission, something for which, due to the particularities of teleworking, he was authorized by the company. The study even indicates that this person (nicknamed A to protect his privacy) came to ask repeatedly whether it was okay to continue to function this way, until finally they told it to stop, and it did. On the other hand, they also comment that the intention to do something similar to the mysterious P3 project was reported, although always alluding to doing it from scratch. This it is supposedly Dark and Darker.

The CEO of IRONMACE is also in the crosshairs, having been accused by Nexon of using stolen trade secrets and other copyrighted material to develop the new project. His previous bosses believe that stealing these secrets is the only way someone came up with the concept of the game, in addition to emphasizing that it’s not possible to have an alpha version of a title of this caliber in such a short time starting without someone else’s base.

“Fortunately, we have evidence which clearly shows how we developed the game quickly and efficiently, and we will make it public soon”, replies the development team that is currently between a rock and a hard place. “We have tons of videos to see what the most important builds are like,” they confidently state.

Of course, the situation is becoming increasingly more twisted and complicated, with a small team fighting against this great Asian company. At the moment, the game is still withdrawn from Steam and we don’t know if it will return and if its creators will be able to get out of this legal debacle.