Dark And Darker Devs Claim Nexon Is Planning To ‘Bleed Them Dry’ In Court Fees
The ensuing legal battle between Nexon and Ironmace has spiraled into a convoluted mess after the latter fired shots at the South Korean video game giant on Discord.
For context, Ironmace is a newly founded studio made up of former Nexon developers who are currently working on a PvPvE dungeon crawler called Dark and Darker. Last month, Nexon filed a DMCA complaint that got the game de-listed from Steam and accused Ironmace of continuing to develop a scrapped project called Project P3 into their own game.
Ironmace responded to the DMCA takedown on Discord saying that they were working with their legal team to fix the problem and that they were being careful with their statements so as not to “jeopardize” their position, although it looks like they’ve decided not to play nice anymore based on their recent statement on Discord asking the community for help in their David vs. Goliath fight against Nexon.
“We aren’t a big ass studio, and we don’t have an infinite supply of money like Nexon,” said an Ironmace developer named Luci. “The reality of the situation is that their end goal is to bleed us dry in court fees. Internally, we know this, they know this, the lawyers know this. They have no real case that will hold up in court but they pray that we fold.”
“Our concern is not the false claims that they have weasled up and fed to every media outlet,” Luci added. “Our game was made from scratch. But we are concerned about being able to support ourselves through this legal battle that they want to drag us through.”
Luci also shared a GoFundMe link in an effort to secure funds for their legal battle against Nexon. The $500,000 crowdfunding campaign managed to raise $46,000 before it was taken down over concerns of its legitimacy. The GoFundMe campaign has since been confirmed to be legitimate and the link will be reposted soon.
“We can confirm this is real as we are in contact with the Ironmace team, it was just a huge misunderstanding from the discord mods and the Ironmace staff,” said the studio. “The GoFundMe link is currently down but will be reposted later, it will be safe to donate when it happens.”
There seems to be more to the campaign’s removal than Ironmace is letting on though if you read between the lines of the studio’s latest statement on Discord.
“Other than officially me or Terry asking you for help, all request for donations to Ironmace are scams,” said developer sdf. “Beware of scams that exist online, and never donate. Our official fundraiser page is currently paused until further notice so any public donation pages should be taken as scam. Terry or I will announce when our official donation page is live. We are very sorry for the confusion caused by our mistake.”
“Just to be clear, the previous fundraising was legitimate, just not at the time we planned. Thank you,” concluded the dev.
