

Nexon filed suit against Ironmace in the state of Washington for both copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets, but Moss argues that the latter claim only concerns one Ironmace employee - Ju-Hyun Choi - and should be settled in South Korean court, where Nexon has been pursuing the claim "for almost two years."

Now, again, this letter is addressed to Valve, asking the company to restore Dark and Darker on Steam in defiance of Nexon's claims of copyright infringement. "The reality is that for every comparison Nexon can come up with, one can find half a dozen different games with the exact same feature - and in some cases, the very same asset." With examples like that, the bulk of the letter continues the argument that the similarities between P3 and Dark and Darker don't go any further than the similarities between any two fantasy games. Even if Nexon can cherry-pick a dozen identical assets between them, that is only a drop in the bucket in terms of actual game design." To the extent that Nexon used the same or similar assets, that does not give rise to a copyright claim." A fantasy game is likely to contain plenty of familiar elements ranging from skeletons to spiders, Moss argues, and says that "a game of the magnitude of Dark and Darker uses thousands of third-party assets in the game. Last week, Nexon formally sued Ironmace for "copyright infringement" and "misappropriation of trade secrets."įurther, Moss says that "what appears in Dark and Darker consists primarily of third-party assets legally acquired from the Unreal Engine asset store. A few weeks later, the game was delisted from Steam in response to a DMCA notice from Nexon. In March, police raided Ironmace in search of the alleged stolen assets, but according to the devs found nothing. In February, Nexon - a megapublisher responsible for some of the biggest online games in the Asian market - accused some of its former developers of stealing assets from an in-development project called P3 as they left the company to found Ironmace and begin development on Dark and Darker. Moss argues that Nexon's claims are "nothing more than anti-competitive bully tactics designed to put a small indie game studio out of business." "The Takedown Notice is based on claims that are entirely without merit and contains knowing and material misrepresentations that Dark and Darker infringed Nexon’s copyright interests," as Greenberg Glusker lawyer Aaron Moss writes on behalf of Ironmace.
