South Korea Supreme Court orders Dark and Darker studio to pay Nexon damages

South Korea’s Supreme Court has left Ironmace facing a 5.7 billion won, about $3.8 million, damages bill over Dark and Darker, turning a long-running dispute with Nexon into a costly legal setback for the studio behind the extraction game.

The ruling drew a hard line between copyright and trade-secret law. The court did not accept Nexon’s copyright infringement claim, and it agreed with lower courts that Dark and Darker is in a different category from Nexon’s unreleased P3 project, which had been described as a battle royale game. Even so, the justices found that Ironmace had improperly used trade secrets taken from Nexon, including source code, graphic resources and internal game data.

The Supreme Court’s Second Division, presided over by Justice Park Young-jae, dismissed appeals from both sides and left the lower court’s conclusion in place. Some reporting put the final award at 5.76464 billion won, down from an earlier 8.5 billion won judgment. Other reports said the court also refused to order a service ban because the trade-secret protection period had already expired.

The case began in 2021, when Nexon accused former employee and current Ironmace CEO Choi Ju-hyun, also reported as Choi Joo-hyun, of leaking P3 source code and data to a personal server before founding Ironmace and developing Dark and Darker. What started as an internal dispute has now stretched through trial and appeals, and the criminal case tied to the same allegations is still ongoing.

For Ironmace, the immediate consequence is financial, but the ruling also gives the studio a clearer path to keep the game online. Ironmace said it could now continue servicing Dark and Darker with more stability and move forward with “full legal certainty.” Nexon, meanwhile, framed the decision as a warning that using another company’s assets for profit carries real consequences even when the final product is not judged to be a copy.

That is what makes this case stand out across the game industry: a title can survive a copyright fight and still be hit with major damages if the court finds stolen internal materials were used to build it. For developers watching closely, Dark and Darker has become one of the clearest modern examples of how trade-secret risk can shape a game’s future long after the initial launch drama has passed.