This Company is Awful

Being 'let go' from a company and not being able to use your own ideas reminds me of a true story of a musician who left his record label and the label tried to sue him when he started writing new songs, because they were too similar to.... his own songs.

The first few seconds was like watching a roulette wheel spin and spin and spin before landing on one of hundreds of thousands of bad companies.

A few years ago I knocked back a job because of wording in the contract regarding anything I created whilst "employed by" the company. I asked them to change the wording and they refused. There's a big difference between something you create in the course of employment and something you create whilst you're employed by a company.

I can't imagine why that one developer was trying to encourage other co-workers to leave and start their own company. 🙃

Nexon being a Korean company since i grew up and am living in Korea, Nexon was well known for ripping off kids and harrasing small developers for a long time. Happy to see these issues getting spotlight in the western world.

Nexon has a history of shutting down a lot of games, so it's not really surprising that they did this to Dark and Darker. That company just keeps digging their own grave.

I hate the system of suing someone just to ruin them draining them of resources. There should be serious backlash to false allegations and lawsuits, because it’s disgusting how much this gets misused.

In Australia if you get sued and defend yourself they have to pay your fees and any time you lost from working and then you can counter claim for more for wasting time and causing unnecessary stress. its weird that in other countries you have to pay for your self after defending false claims.

Nexon is the type of company to throw a fit because their cousin has a cooler balloon animal than them, so they're doing all they can to pop it.

Dark and Darker is such an amazing game. Nexon just realized they fucked up and now they want it. Corporate greed knows no bounds.

From what I can tell in Korean, the situation seems to be a bit more... sticky. I don't know how much of the 'narrative' is due to Nexon's influence in Korean media (and online gambling addicts), but Nexon might have a case. I won't go over Nexon's actions, because the video covers it nicely, and their history demonstrates that they're honestly not a very nice company regardless of this situation. The disciplinary firing of the P3 lead developer. Outside of restructuring, firing someone outright is a really big no no under Korean labor laws, and with the labor union involved it becomes a massive headache. So even larger employers like Nexon avoid that route unless they think they have a solid case. Nexon's case is that the previous lead developer of P3 (current dev of Dark and Darker) leaked company IP and attempted to persuade the rest of the P3 team to come and work for him while he still held a company position. A point of contention was that the dev had an approved copy of P3 on a personal server due to the pandemic for remote working and, according to Nexon, retained it even after the end of that policy which got leaked and showcased to future investors for Ironmace. The dev claims he wiped his server, and I think the result of the police raid will determine the validity of that statement. There was also a post by an anonymous P3 developer that accused the lead dev of betrayal and of stealing the ideas of P3 team members who didn't join Ironmace with some pretty specific info, but as with all anonymous posts, its veracity remains unclear. The police raid. There were two raids conducted by the anti-terror/espionage division of the police in January 2022, and on the 7th of this month. The first raid was based on claims of code-stealing and industrial espionage. The "nothing to worry about" seems to be based on the order by the Prosecution Service to the police last December to redo the investigation after being forwarded the case by the police in August, which is what triggered the second raid. The last part is not a very good sign because a) that usually means the prosecution thinks there's a viable case to be made with a bit more evidence, and b) based on the 7 months it took them to get that order out, it's probably going to be a long and bloody fight, which is very unfavorable for Ironmace. Going bankrupt from drawn out legal proceedings is a genuine possibility against an entity like Nexon. And at the end of the day, even if the specific assets and code for Dark and Darker turn out to be independently developed from P3, the lead dev could still be found guilty of violating IP protection laws if he did indeed showcase P3 to outside investors for the explicit purpose of starting an independent venture, which might in turn affect Ironmace's legal standing if it's determined that funding was obtained illegally. Ultimately and legally, the whole thing comes down to whether or not Nexon can prove to the legal system that the lead dev engaged in industrial espionage and/or IP theft. Can the lead dev be accused of stealing, or can he prove that Dark and Darker was something recreated independently from P3 with legal funding sources? I'm not a lawyer or anything. I might have gotten things wrong. Take this post with a grain of salt too. e: I'm not blaming Charlie here folks. The degree of information disparity for non-Korean speaking individuals have been particularly severe for this case. Nexon is largely a Korean company with most of its userbase and development teams located in Korea, so it's no surprise that they release statements in Korean that predominantly gets published in Korean through domestic media. Dark and Darker has garnered pretty good international attention, which explains why they would bother releasing extensive English statements at all. Some seem to think that Ironmace deliberately attempted to mislead western audiences with their English statements, but I hesitate to point fingers like that at this point, due to the low level of information we currently have access to and the fact that it might just be translation woes/human error. All I know for certain is that the whole situation is a damn shame, since it looked like a cool game.

I spent way too much money in Maple Story as a kid on items that would EXPIRE after a month. They'd literally jank out the skins from your inventory and kill your pet unless you bought a life potion. Then they'd introduce skins that didn't expire but they were the price of actual real life clothes. It wasn't unusual to spend 60 buck on a outfit and face makeover.

Imagine if FromSoftware/Bandai went after everyone that has made a souls-like game. Feels pretty odd to say you own a genre

Charlie saw the claims of asset theft and was like: "This is unreal"

Corrections I found in this 1. the employees left after the project was cancelled not fired. 2. the lawsuit is over stolen code, nothing about assets 3. employees working under & for any specific IP that intellectual property belongs to the company. This means you can't just go recreate the same game under a different company. (It's written within the confines of your contract of employment under "Most" game development companies.) 4. even if the things charlie claims in this video about assets are true or false the game is identical to P3. Not defending either side but go do your own research before forming an opinion.

The smoking gun... Nexon filed copyrights for P3 last month. So about 2 years after the project was cancelled, and right after Dark and Darker was gaining a lot of popularity.

That's a common legal tactic larger companies use, they intentionally start legal battles because they know the smaller company cannot afford it in the same way they can. A lot of corporations do this to get rid of competition.

I feel so bad for the people working a Ironmace, imagine putting your heart and soul into a game and having nearly everyone who played your game say nothing but good thing about it only to have some greedy gaming company not only claim you stole their code and assets but actually have your game removed from the most popular online store for pc games.

A customs shop I worked for did this type of thing, a lot of former employees including myself brought up ideas that the owner didn’t want to use because “it didn’t fit the work culture”, even as far as saying they wouldn’t work. These were not only ideas on how to run the shop more efficiently but also what other services we could offer and a certain price point. When those employees quit or got fired, he would use those same ideas and take all the credit saying he was the one who thought of them. Fuck RTP Customs in Alpharetta, GA.

Before they were called "fps" they were called "doom clones"