South Korean Supreme Court orders Dark and Darker dev Ironmace to pay $3.84 million to Nexon

As reported by Automaton and ThisIsGame, the civil case between publisher Nexon and developer Ironmace has been settled, with the South Korean Supreme Court ordering Ironmace to pay Nexon 5.7 billion won ($3.84 million) in damages. The decision doesn’t appear to be a clear victory for either party, and the criminal case related to Nexon’s accusations remains ongoing.

Dark and Darker, a fantasy dungeon crawler extraction game, took the 2023 Steam Next Fest by storm before the game itself was overshadowed by its legal troubles. The founding members of Ironmace were all former Nexon employees, and the publisher alleges that they violated copyright and took Nexon trade secrets with them to make Dark and Darker. The center of the controversy is Project P3, a game allegedly similar to Dark and Darker that Nexon canceled, precipitating the Ironmace founders’ departure.

The Supreme Court ruling shifted things slightly in Ironmace’s favor vs. the last time we checked in on this case. In a lower court ruling last year, it was found that Ironmace had not violated Nexon’s copyright, but did infringe on the company’s trade secrets⁠—look, man, I don’t get it either.

I guess that’s why I’m writing articles and not making decisions on the South Korean Supreme Court. Ironmace was ordered to pay out 8.5 billion won ($5.9 million). The Supreme Court appears to have knocked the price down while keeping the gist of the ruling.

And this is still not the end of it: There’s an ongoing criminal case over Ironmace’s alleged use of material the developers took with from Nexon⁠—remember how it’s offices were raided by police all the way back in 2023? Near as I can tell, this ending to the civil case is like if King Solomon went through with splitting that baby in half: Nexon would have preferred to nail Ironmace with copyright infringement, maybe even get D&D DandD taken offline, while Ironmace is obviously chafing at the payout.

We live in the era of the ambiguous, unending, devs vs. publishers legal drama. The disputes over Disco Elysium loom large in my mind, and the knife fight over Ashes of Creation appears to just be getting started, even as the Kickstarted MMO dies a final death. One of the most recently-initiated battles may be on track for the most clear-cut resolution: Subnautica’s leadership team has been reinstated following a ruling against Krafton.