The Wild Tale of Dark and Darker's Dev Battle - Extra Credits

Over the years, we've all seen a ton of wild lawsuits in the games industry. From the guy who sued EA saying he had a patent on sports video games to Epic's epic attack on the Apple App Store, but few actually have been wilder than what's going on with Dark and Darker right now. So, let's talk about the emotional roller coaster that game is going through and what it could mean for the entire industry. Thanks so much to Incogni for helping to keep people's personal data personal. Okay, let's start at the beginning. Dark and Darker is a, you guessed it, dark fantasy extraction looter made by a small Korean team called Iron Mace. And when everything started out, things seemed gangbusters for them. They were the scrappy indie going up against Korean giants like their former boss, Nexon. They launched their alpha to both acclaim and a huge user base. Players were hungry for this sort of game. Then they launched subsequent tests for the game and it just grew. Over a million players jumped in to try something very decidedly alpha, but storm clouds were

gathering on the horizon and legal action was hanging over the head of one of their employees, who we're going to refer to in this episode as leader A for the sake of anonymity. Before working on Dark and Darker at Iron Mace, leader A used to be the head of a project at Nexon code named Project P3. And during the height of the COVID pandemic, while they were working from home, leader A began using a personal server to house assets and code for P3. According to him, he got the okay to do this from the higher-ups at Nexon, though Nexon says not so much. As time went on, leader A began to clash with Nexon leadership. He got frustrated with the project, told people on the team that he was going to quit and start a P3 competitor, and that they should all come and join him, which almost half of the P3 team eventually would. Oddly though, he doesn't quit. Instead, he's fired when someone at Nexon realizes he's taken NDA'd company property and put it on a private server. Now, who knows, right? Maybe someone at Nexon said he could do this and then someone else later found out, completely disagreed, and got mad about it. Or

maybe he never had the okay in the first place. As a dev, James told me he can't really see why a large company like Nexon would okay something like that rather than just making sure the team had the relatively nominal resources required to have a server that met their needs. But on the other hand, both James and I have had enough experience with larger companies with horrible internal communications that we can totally see leader A shooting an email off to a middle manager saying something like "Hey, servers were being inefficient. I'm throwing everything on my private server for the team if that's okay." And then the middle manager, who probably isn't technical, saying, "Yeah, sure." Only for legal to find out a year later and have a conniption. So, who knows? All we have to go on is the fact that it looks like leader A was given some authorization to export very early files, though importantly not build files, according to Nexon, to a private server for testing. So, point to Iron Mace. But also that leader A signed a forensic agreement to turn the server over for examination, and he um and I'm quoting here from the Nexon legal brief, "instructed an acquaintance to

permanently delete the files on his personal servers instead." And the server was wiped multiple times so that the data could not be recovered. So, yeah, uh point to Nexon? But that was just the thunderhead. The true storm was coming. As Dark and Darker gained momentum on Steam, as it was blowing up across the world, Nexon decided its similarities to P3 were just too great. So, they had to go for the source. They filed a DMCA takedown notice with Steam. Now, as we all know, DMCA takedowns are notorious for being guilty until proven innocent claims. And according to US safe harbor laws, that meant that Steam had to take down the game if they think there's any chance that the claim has merit. So, down it went. Then things started to get unhinged. Korean police raided Iron Mace's headquarters because in Korea some of the complaints amount to criminal charges. Nexon filed a full-fledged lawsuit against Iron Mace in the US, showing in their brief that thousands of files with the same file names are used in Dark and Darker that were used in P3. Iron Mace doesn't deny

this, but fires back that these are largely asset store assets, which is true. But, as much as I do really hate to make Nexon's case here, it is very odd that you'd use exactly the same asset packs for a new game unless, you know, you and your team had learned how to work with them from your time at another company and maybe even had some ideas on how to put them together into engaging dungeon rooms from having done so before. But, Nexon also put together an almost comical description of the game type that it says Dark and Darker is infringing on, leading to one of the most glorious sentences I've ever read in a legal doc. I quote, "Because it's not possible to fully explain all the similarities of a three-dimensional and dynamic video games in a two-dimensional and static legal pleading, they'll provide some examples." And while they do bring up PvPvE, because you can't really copyright a genre, they go on to talk about the games having the same classes, the concept art looking similar, some of the abilities being identical, and then real winners like both P3 and Dark and Darker feature scary monster NPCs that attack

human-controlled characters. Though, to be fair, this was just a preamble for them saying that a lot of monsters in both are similar. Oh boy. To which, in a move I can't imagine any legal counsel approving of, the Iron Mace team responded by posting a Discord rant with their entire legal strategy. Remember that disputed server from earlier? Well, Iron Mace's Discord explosion included choice lines about it like, "Due to the harassment and lack of respect from the company, and after consulting with his lawyers, he concluded that his private information on his private servers was not subject to any records, so he deleted this information to ensure his privacy." Which, you know, is not the best look. Iron Mace continues, "The founder has on multiple occasions told members of his team that they must be extra diligent in ensuring that everything is done by by books in order to uphold the vision and branding of the company. To James, this was a super strange sentence because when does a CEO come to a dev team and say something like, "Be careful not to break the law, everyone." unless he was thinking that they might possibly be doing that. They basically go on to call Nexon scrubs.

Quote, "Just because it may be difficult for a large bureaucratic company such as Nexon to develop games in such a short time frame does not mean it's impossible for another studio, big, small, new, or old to develop games quickly." Unquote. Hey, that's fair. But then the coup de grace. Quote, "The premise for adventurers delving into dungeons full of monsters and treasures in their quest to seek riches is so generic and common that it can broadly be applied to numerous other fantasy games." Then they asked ChatGPT to, quote, "Come up with a description for a generic PvP dungeon crawling game that created an eerily similar game description below." Ah, the old our game idea is so bland a chatbot could have come up with it legal strategy. Works every time. That was shortly followed by a Discord admin posting a link to a GoFundMe to help pay Iron Mace's legal costs. Immediately followed by another mod jumping on and warning people that that GoFundMe was a scam. Immediately followed in short order by one of the devs jumping on and saying that it actually wasn't a scam, but they hadn't meant to go live with it

yet saying that the post had been made, quote, "Without approval due to a passionate member of the team taking matters into their own hands." Unquote. And then warning people against donating online in general. The chaos continued as since they'd been removed from Steam, they told users to torrent their game to get access to the next playtest. To which many users responded, "Y'all know how many malware torrents are going to be put up with the same names?" leading to them distributing the hash to allow users to make sure they were getting the real torrents. And sure, the playtest was rocky, but honestly, it's a huge feat that they were even able to pull it off given how much pressure they were under. So, congrats on that. And as of now, things hang in legal limbo until some settlement is reached or a court date is set. But look, we all know why this is happening, right? Because Dark and Darker was successful. Because a project Nexon mothballed turned out to be a great idea. In our opinion, Nexon seems to be crushing Iron Mace with an impossible legal fight while they develop a version of P3 and get it to market first. Now, does that make Nexon wrong or Iron Mace innocent? Neither,

necessarily. But what it does do is set up a terrifying precedent for indie devs in a world where more and more of the market is owned by a handful of giant companies. Well, as the great George Orwell once so eloquently put it, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a microtransaction-based NFT-skinned boot stamping on an indie dev's face forever. That was the quote, right? And you know, speaking of Orwellian nightmare scenarios, I don't know about all of you, but in the past few years, I've been getting way more spam emails fishing for my personal info and robo calls hawking services for stuff like extended warranties on a car that I do not have. Well, we have data brokers to thank for that. These supervillain-sounding groups that gather personal data on all of us as we go about our lives online and IRL, or that, you know, scrape all of those data breaches that seem to be happening just all the time now for some reason. They get stuff like your name, phone number, social security number, login credentials, location history, online activity, and just a bunch more info,

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