Dark and Darker launches then deletes a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for copyright dispute

gamesradar.com:

A GoFundMe campaign to raise money to support the salaries and legal costs for Dark and Darker developer Ironmace was taken offline less than an hour after it went live.

As spotted by PC Gamer (opens in new tab), the fundraiser managed to raise $46,000 of its $500,000 goal before the campaign was removed due to reports it was "prematurely announced".

Dark and Darker was removed from Steam last weekend (opens in new tab) after the team was served with a cease and desist request from publisher Nexon, which alleges that some of Dark and Darker's development code – which was created by members of Ironmace's team whilst they still worked at the publisher – originates from Nexon's own dungeon crawler, codenamed P3.

"Support the Ironmace team in light of the known ongoing legal circumstances," the fundraising page said before it was removed. "All donations will be used as supplementary funding towards the known legal circumstances and also provide continued salary towards the development team."

Since then, chatter on the game's Discord server suggests that there had originally been some confusion over the authenticity of the fundraiser. But after it was deemed to be real, it seemed the campaign was launched "without approval due to a passionate member of the team taking matters into his own hands", which is why it was taken down.

"We have currently paused the campaign for now as it was prematurely announced," Discord admin Graysun later explained. "We appreciate the enormous amount of support shown in such a little amount of time!

"We are very sorry for the confusion and will take the proper steps to resolve this within the next few hours. We will make another announcement on how the GoFundMe will be handled."

The developer