Dark and Darker’sincredibly unique playtestfaces another blow, as the torrent link is copyright claimed onTwitter. Now, it’s largely up to the fanbase to circulate the download link, which could make the process of joining the playtest much riskier
This comes as Dark and Darker developer Ironmace Games attempts to resist legal pressure and distribute the most recent demo as planned. Right now, the studio is even trying to put out a hotfix for the game, sharing yet another torrent link on its Twitter account.
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The tweet that shared the original playtest link has now been taken down, with Twitter leaving the message: “This Tweet from @IronmaceGames has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.” It doesn’t say who this copyright holder could be, but it’s almost definitely tied to its legal issues with Korean game publisher, Nexon.
Of course, Nexon’s claims are the reason that Dark and Darker is being distributed via torrent in the first place. It all kicked off in February, when Nexonfirst went public with claims that Ironmace has committed “asset theft"with Dark and Darker. This stems from the fact that Ironmace is made up of former Nexon staff, with the publisher alleging that these devs are now using code that they wrote for a scrapped Nexon project.
Ironmace has consistently denied these claims, but it was enough to getDark and Darker booted off Steam. Since then, the devs have been fighting to keep the game’s development ticking along, setting up a GoFundMe(which was also taken down), and now, distributing a playtest and hotfixes via torrent links.
Nexon hasn’t commented on this latest development, but it’s not clear who else would have had the tweet taken down over copyright concerns. It seems that Ironmace is self-publishing the game too, so it’s unlikely to be an issue on its own end. It is, however, worth noting that Nexon has been pretty quiet on socials ever since this drama kicked off - which is pretty understandable when you see the replies to its last few tweets.
All of this conflict aside, the playtest seems to be going down surprisingly well with fans. Admittedly, many are still fighting to actually get it running on their PC, but those that have seem to be enjoying their time with it, especially after the latest hotfix. This is a rare bit of good news for Ironmace, who has put a whole lot of effort into distributing this playtest. I’m never going to complain about a bulky beta download ever again after this.
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