The Court has cleared Ironmace on copyright infringement, but has held Ironmace guilty of trade secret infringement; and ordered Ironmace to pay Nexon 8.5 Billion Won (works out to 5.87 million in USD) in damages. This ruling comes almost 4 years after the case was first filed by Nexon against Ironmace in Aug 2021.
Nexon had claimed that Ironmace created ‘Dark & Darker’ by using internal data of Nexon, from ‘Project P3’ which was, at that time, under development by Nexon. The interesting point here is, that quite a few developers at Ironmace were previously with Nexon, including CEO Terence Park Seung-ha. Nexon contended that Ju-Hyun Choi (project leader for P3), who was fired in Aug 2021 by Nexon, first transferred source code and data to a personal server, and then helped Ironmace develop Dark & Darker.
The order was delivered by Director General Park Chan-seok at the Seoul Central District Court Civil Division 63. Nexon had filed a case in US as well, however, the court had ruled that this would be better decided in South Korea, where both the developers are based. And it looks like that is exactly what has happened.
Dark & Darker, at the time of the filing in US, was also pulled off Steam for a while, till after the court ruling when it then made a comeback and also generated a decent amount of buzz. The game was on Steam from June 2024, and hit an all-time high active player count of 57k, before stabilizing at the 11k-13k range. Dark & Darker sits at 70.47% rating on Steam.
