Nexon sends cease and desist order.
Dark and Darker is one of the larger extraction games on the horizon, if you go by the recent playtests that have drawn in over 100,000 concurrent users at times. Apparently nobody is more upset about the game’s ongoing success than Nexon, who has been claiming for the last couple of years that Dark and Darker was built using stolen code from an unreleased title Project P3 that the company scrapped.
There’s a whole rabbit hole to go down on this topic, but the gist of it involves the director of P3 being fired after allegedly leaking source code and assets and that director then allegedly convinced other employees to quit and start working on their own version of P3, which is now Dark and Darker. If you look at the publicly available screenshots of P3, it is very clear that Dark and Darker was at the very least continuing development of the game in spirit. There has been no evidence presented to the public that Dark and Darker uses stolen assets or code from P3.
All of this has come to a head as the Dark and Darker Steam page disappeared, with Ironmace confirming Nexon being the source of the takedown. According to a post on the official Discord, Ironmace has been served a cease and desist order and the Steam page has received a copyright takedown.
To all our fans, we have recently been served a cease and desist letter and DMCA takedown by Nexon regarding Dark and Darker based on distorted claims. We are currently working with our legal team to remedy this issue in the best manner possible. Due to the sensitive legal nature of this issue we must be careful with our statements so as to not jeopardize our position. We ask for your understanding as we work to get the game back up as quickly as possible. Please know that we will do all that is possible for our fans. Thanks!
Will Dark and Darker reappear? We’ll have to wait and see.
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