It's been a damn couple of months for the developers of the dungeon crawler PvP extraction game. dark and darker
Dark and Darker's fourth alpha playtest in February was a surprise success, reaching a peak of over 100,000 concurrent players as a Steam Next Fest demo. It was a great time to play at a party with friends, great fodder for clip builds, RPG build theorists, PvP lovers, and finally gave me the non-FPS pull game I was needing.
After that high of highs, dark and darker has been in free fall
But Ironmace had already announced a fifth playtest from April 14-19, and damn, they were going to get players back into the game. So they asked everyone to torrent it.
Ironmace informed players that the torrent link had been removed "due to Discord's policy of not allowing torrent links."
Ironmace posted the torrent link on his official Twitter, which was removed for similar reasons.
Ironmace distributed the link again through a text scrambler tool that circumvented the ban on torrent links.
The Dark and Darker servers went down on Saturday for an extended time while no developers were available to fix the issue.
One of the official Discord admins briefly blocked the server's general chat room to explain the situation amid hundreds of players spamming "HOLD THE LINE" in support of the developers.
Ironmace said it was hit by "incredibly sophisticated and powerful DDoS attacks" during tests.
Ironmace somehow completed two hotfixes (also distributed via torrent) over the course of the weekend.
(Image credit: Ironmace)
And despite the total trash fire, gamers love it. YouTube is full of videos of Dark and Darker players showing off and sharing their builds. Reddit has threads defending the developers and lamenting the end of the test. The biggest point of contention on the official Discord is the disappointment that Ironmace didn't extend the end date of the playtest to make up for the downtime over the weekend. If another game was being so tragically messed up, it might have been turned on by its own fans, but Ironmace is a small indie team and Dark and Darker is just a really fun game.
Before the Nexon flesh came to light, Ironmace was presented as an underdog on a mission. A statement on his website reads:
We're a cheery bunch of veteran game developers disillusioned by the greedy and exploitative practices we once helped create. We are experts who have worked on many of Korea's biggest hits.
We've seen firsthand how corporate gaming companies sell their souls for easy payday. We are disappointed to see them double down on exploitative practices more and more, becoming more like casinos instead of bringing joy to players.
We are fighting to win back the hearts of players around the world.
I admit I want to believe this is a case of a big publisher unfairly criticizing some rudimentary developers and that Ironmace's self-professed anti-exploitation values โโare genuine. We may never know the full story of the legal claim against the studio, and like it or not, Nexon may have a case. Even if it is, being on the right side of the law has never been a prerequisite for punk.
For now, what we have is very clear evidence of just how incredibly tenacious Ironmace has been in getting players to engage with his game. After being banned from the biggest game store on PC, Ironmace went on to subvert the rules on both Discord and Twitter and forced many gamers to learn how to torrent files for the first time in their lives in order to play an alpha. It was the punkiest PC gaming moment of 2023 so far.
