dark and darker was removed from steam After Asset Theft Allegations, His Unauthorized GoFundMe Page Got demolished after raising $46,000, so the developers made it possible alpha build torrent of the game, which was... close due to copyright claims. If you've somehow gotten into playtesting after all this, the servers may be down as it's now being DDoSed.
As reported by PCGamesNthe news was shared by an Ironmace admin and developer, Graysun, on the game's Discord: "We have been experiencing sophisticated DDoS attacks since the beginning of this playtest. Our server quality has not changed at all from the tests. of previous games.
"At this point, there's not much we can do to fix the situation right away, but we're constantly doing everything we can to keep them stabilized." He then urged the players to "defend the line."
Nothing has been said about the DDoS attacks since last night, so it's unclear who is responsible and how Ironmace will better protect its servers against such attacks in the future. In the meantime, he has rolled out another hotfix and the servers appear to be up and running again, but fans are asking Ironmace to extend the playtest given the lost time.
Dark and Darker has a long, convoluted, and messy history. It first started with another studio, Nexxon, which had several prototypes for different games in development under the names Ps, P1, P2, etc. One of these, P3, was a Dark and Darker style game, but was scrapped by Nexxon in favor of P7. This prompted the P3 developers to start their own studio, Ironmace, to finish what they had started.
However, Nexxon filed charges against Ironmace, alleging that it had stolen assets and code from P3 without compensation in order to continue working on it under a new company. Ironmace CEO Park Terence Seung-ha denied the claims, saying "our code was built from scratch" and "assets are purchased from the Unreal marketplace." It's unclear at this point who is telling the truth, but these allegations led to Dark and Darker's removal from Steam.
While the legal issues are still ongoing and the game is not yet available on Steam, the developers are moving forward with playtesting, with the current one ending tomorrow. Ironmace's goal is to release Dark and Darker in Q4 2023, but that's looking less and less likely. Even if it does finish development despite the mounting problems it faces, the ongoing legal dispute with Nexxon means it can't be relisted on Steam, so it can't launch properly without continuing to allow players to torrent.
