Dark and Darker is currently in development for PC. Dark and Darker Devs Deny Using Stolen Assets and Code Dark and Darker developer Ironmace denies the recent allegations that the studio uses Dark And Darker Gold stolen assets and code in its upcoming dungeon crawler.
The developers of the first-person dungeon crawler Dark and Darker officially deny using stolen code and assets in the upcoming game. This denial comes after a Korean gaming news site published a story alleging that indie developer Ironmace plagiarized content from the team's previous employer.
Dark and Darker is an upcoming first-person action RPG dungeon crawler developed by freshman studio Ironmace. Teams of adventurers explore the labyrinthine depths, gathering loot and surviving hazards, including other players, until a portal opens, allowing them to escape. The game doesn't have a precise release date yet, but its most recent open beta test proved to be a massive hit when it went live earlier this month, propelling Dark and Darker to the top of the Steam charts. While it is Ironmace's first game, the team behind it clearly has no shortage of game development experience.
Last week, the Korean gaming news site This Is Game published a story alleging that Ironmace is developing Dark and Darker using code and assets from the Korean-Japanese game publisher Nexon. Specifically, the report alleges that Ironmace's founders are former Nexon employees who were caught trying to steal assets and code from a canceled game codenamed P3. However, Ironmace denied these allegations on the game's official discord server, insisting that Dark and Darker contains no plagiarized materials and saying, "This has already been audited by an outside agency. As far as we know you cannot copyright a game genre."
Nexon reportedly canceled P3 in 2021, the same year of Ironmace's founding. Screenshots of the canceled cheap Darker Gold project also look quite similar to Ironmace's upcoming game, and it's not impossible that the PvPvE dungeon crawler Dark and Darker drew inspiration from Nexon's canned project. However, that is not necessarily proof of plagiarism, with Ironmace stating that all Dark and Darker’s assets were either made in-house or purchased legally through the Unreal Engine marketplace.