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 Dark And Darker Gold, 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 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.
The Dark and Darker developer also denied a report from the Korean news outlet YTN stating that Nexon was suing Ironmace and that the latter company was under investigation. The studio claims that the lawsuit is a personal matter involving one of its members. Ironmace maintains that the company as a whole is not subject to any legal action.
Ironmace attributes these allegations to false rumors spread by "a disgruntled third party" and that the Dark and Darker developer is handling the matter privately. The company representative also said it will not make any further statements about the allegations for the time being. Hopefully, this means that the controversy will not impact the development of the highly anticipated Dark and Darker. Still, it may be too soon to predict how the situation will shake out Dark And Darker Gold for sale.