The developers of this Steam banned game accuse their former publisher of bullying

Game news The developers of this Steam banned game accuse their former publisher of bullying

It’s going to be a soap opera if you keep hearing about this story. If you haven’t followed everything, a summary is in order! Dark and Darker, developed by iron maceis an RPG set in one world middle ages fantasy, which has not yet been officially published. Although it looked promising, the Steam page dedicated to this title has been removed. The reason ? Asian company Nexon accuses Ironmace of stealing the source code of one of their games in production (codenamed P3).

Nevertheless, the Ironmace developers quickly showed their outrage at this accusation. Despite this controversy that forbids them from seeing their title on the famous PC games distribution platform, Steam, the developers have taken unexpected means to make the playtest accessible to gamers. On BitTorrent, some netizens were able to touch Dark and Darker.

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Developers Strike Back!

iron mace has absolutely no intention of remaining passive in the face of Nexon’s allegations. For the lawyer Aaron Moss stands up for the developers of Dark and darker by sending Valve a letter requesting the DMCA to remove the title from the catalog.

Nexon’s claims relate to a game that Nexon never made and does not exist. Nexon claims to have created “unique concepts, genres, plots, storylines, characters, and plans for the game”, almost none of which are copyrighted. While actual expression of the plot, plot, and characters can certainly be protected, copyright does not protect concepts.

Accordingly moss, Nexon reportedly pointed out the similarities in the concept art of their P3 project. Only, according to this attorney, a fantasy game is likely to keep coming back to this type of universe “ranging from skeletons to spiders,” and that a game like Dark and Darker uses thousands of elements of this style. In summary, the similarities between Dark and Darker and P3 don’t go beyond similarities between two fantastic games.

In addition, the same attorney added that the “trade secret misappropriation” lawsuit against Ironmace actually only targets one of Ironmace’s employees, Ju-Hyun Choi.

At best, Nexon took a handful of out-of-copyright material and stitched it together to form the illusion of a copyright infringement complaint, but in reality this case boils down to Nexon not wanting any of its former employees to work at an independent studio developing one Fantasy extraction game. And Nexon is willing to bend copyright law far beyond its breaking point to keep Dark and Darker out of the public eye.

to see if Valve is persuaded by the letter, or whether the game remains banned from the distribution platform. In any case, this case doesn’t seem to be over for a long time and we’ll be hearing from Ironmace and Nexon.