The case of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark and Darker is a messy one, and there's very little to go off when determining who's right and who's wrong. However, even with the slivers of information we have, it's a fascinating case that raises the ethical question of who exactly owns an idea. Let's start with the facts we have, and go from there. A few years ago, Korean studio Nexxon was working on a variety of prototypes which it codenames with Ps; P1, P2, and so on. There's a Dark and Darker-style game called P3. Nexxon decides instead to make P7, so several of the devs working on P3 leave and form the studio Ironmace to make their own game - which, as you might have guessed, is Dark and Darker.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ne♍xxon is accusing these devs of stealꦅing assets. That is, taking pieces of code or objects within the game that were built for P3 under Nexxon's roof, and reusing them without any compensation. Ironmace CEO Park Terence Seung-ha, on the other hand❀, contests that "our code was built from scratch,&🔯quot; while their "assets are purchased from the Unreal marketplace", adding that it has already been audited by an outside agency. They admit the game itself is similar to P3, but then they were the ones who pitched it, designed it, built it. They took it to Nexxon, who threw it out, so they left and re☂built it.
There are a couple of quotes which particularly stand out. This first is when Seung-ha notes "as far as we know you cannot copyright a game genre", which raises the interesting question of how much can a game be copyrighted at all. Characters involved, places, specific assets, sure. But how many games have we played involving grizzled soldiers in hostile warzones, brave knights opening chests of gold in dungeons, big burly wa♑rriors tearing apart anyone who comes near them? Games iterate on each other all the time, borrowing ideas and developing tropes. Thꦜe only difference here is Dark and Darker is not borrowing from an existing game, but from a prototype the devs themselves made.
Then there's the explanation on Ironmace's website, explaining how the team left Nexxon. "We are a merry band of veteran game developers disillusioned by the exploitative and greedy practices we once helped create," it says. "We are experts who have worked on many of the biggest hits in Korea. We have seen first hand how corporate game companies sell their soul for the easy payday. We are disappointed to see them doubling down on more and more exploitative practices, becoming more like casinos instead of bringing joy to gamers."
Obviously, this is pretty loaded language designed to sell the studio as a 'by the gamers, for the gamers' establishment, and going after very populist talking points like big studios being all out for money and everything being a casino these days is a good way to get people on your side. It's a little transparent once you've seen enough of these messages, but Nexxon's accusations do help Ironmace play up this narrative of being 'against the man' even more.
Of course, we're only getting one side of the story here. The game has been pulled from Steam until the matter is🍎 settled, and it's foolish in a case with this much secrecy to simply take the word of the most convincing opening statement. Ironmace may have cut corners by stealing codes or assets, and that's another question. But it's not really about who is right or wrong. It's about if a single person in one building pitches an idea, works on it with a team in that same building, then goes to the head of the building who rejects the idea, who owns the idea? Is it the building's idea because it all happened under its roof, or the person's who had the idea, cultivated it, raised it, and perfected it, only to have it thrown in the trash?
If you think that sounds like a silly question, you should know that in a lot of game dev contracts, the answer is the building owns it. It happened under the building's roof, so the building gets to store it in the trash can, and if the person who had the idea wants to make it anyway, that's just kinda tough. Ironmace has gone ahead and done it anyways, and it will be fascinating to see where it goes from here.
It's telling that Seung-ha says "as far as we know" when it comes to copyright, because the most powerful media forces tend to be able to bend the rules at will to continue to benefit from them, even if the only benefit is to stop others from making money with resources that weren't going to be used anyway. It's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction that Ironmace are thieves or Nexxon are money-grubbing cheats, but at the moment it’s impossible to know either way. One thing’s for sure, though: this case could have further reaching consequences than just Dark and Darker.