Dark And Darker removed from Steam following accusations of stolen trade secrets

rockpapershotgun.com:

You might have heard of Dark And Darker, a dungeon-crawling take on Escape From Tarkov’s PvPvE that’s been gaining popularity over the last few months. Alice0 enjoyed its alpha playtest last December, and it ended up becoming one of the most popular games of February's Steam Next Fest. It wasn't due to launch in full until sometime this winter, but that window's now up in the air after Dark And Darker was removed from Steam over the weekend, following a messy legal dispute between Nexon and developers Ironmace, who have been accused of “using trade secrets and copyrighted information,” allegedly stolen from Nexon.

“To all our fans,” Ironmace wrote on their Discord server (then reposted to Reddit) “we have recently been served a cease and desist letter and DMCA takedown by Nexon regarding Dark and Darker based on distorted claims.”

What are these distorted claims? Well, in their DMCA letter (which you can read in full here) Nexon say they were developing a project codenamed P3 in 2020-2021, and they claim Ironmace stole assets and ideas from P3, turning it into Dark And Darker. Their first claim involves a former employee - Ju-Hyun Choi - who allegedly “acquired and transferred, without authorisation, more than 11,000 build files… to his personal server.” Nexon say they subsequently fired this employee, who then, apparently, went on to approach other Nexon devs, urging them to leave and develop a P3-like game. Another Nexon employee, Terence Park, founded Ironmace a few months later, and many Nexon employees, including Choi, joined the Dark And Darker developer.

In a response posted to Discord (again reposted to Reddit), Ironmace say that Choi was using a personal server for the use of P3’s programming team since