PC and mobile gaming can sometimes feel like two separate worlds, so we’re always excited when we hear about a popular title making the leap from one to the other. Dark and Darker is a medieval-themed, multiplayer, first-person extraction loot-and-trade game that’s been building up some buzz on PC. It’s proven incredibly popular in just a few months on Steam, and this week we’re learning about a deal that was just made to bring the game to smartphone.
Dark and Darker developer Ironmace recently granted Krafton, the folks behind PUBG, rights tocreate the official smartphone versionof this popular title (via Eurogamer). Since its initial release on Steam earlier this year, Dark and Darker has garnered attention both for being aquality adventure game— and for the growing legal drama surrounding it.
Players have lauded Dark and Darker for its satisfying gameplay loop and resourceful recombination of popular game genres. After choosing a character from one of six archetypal fantasy classes, you spawn into a procedurally generated dungeon, fight other players and monsters, and take risks to get out with as much loot as possible — or risk too and much die trying to escape an ever-shrinking map. After trading with vendors, it’s time to repeat the process.
The legal drama, meanwhile, began a few years ago. A group of game developers working at the South Korean gaming company Nexon split off to start what became Ironmace. Nexon allegesIronmace developers created Dark and Darker with stolen codefrom a game in development during their stint at Nexon.
Nexon sent Ironmace acease-and-desistorder and aDMCA takedown noticeto Steam, and sued in both US District Court in Washington and in South Korean. Police their raided Ironmace’s studio to seize related evidence. Steam ultimately delisted Dark and Darker and Ironmace re-released the gameon its own siteand on theindependent game development platform Chaf Games. Ironmace denies Nexon’s intellectual property claims and posted aChat GPT-aided rebuttal on Reddit.
A US District Court judgedismissedNexon’s claims on August 18. Litigation between Nexon and Ironmace in Korea’s Suwon District Court wasongoing as of that date. Kraftonpublicly acknowledgesongoing litigation between Nexon and Ironmace, according to Gamesindustry.biz.
So, check the game out if you like battle royale extraction games like Escape from Tarkov, or to keep up withthe latest from the PUBG folks. We’ll be curious to see how this legal battle unfolds next, and what impact it ultimately has on efforts towards this mobile port.
