In 2021, a group of Nexon employees were working on a project dubbed P3 Dark And Darker Gold. One of the project team leaders left the company after being accused of leaking or stealing data, project assets, and source code. Over time, approximately 10 other P3 team members left Nexon and moved to Ironmace, the developer of Dark and Darker. In December 2022, the game began an alpha playtest, which was accessible via Steam. A couple of months later, it was revealed that Nexon had filed a legal complaint accusing Dark and Darker's developer of using P3 project code and assets in its new dungeon crawler.

Nexon claims that its project was used as a prototype for Dark and Darker, which showed “striking similarities with the concept for P3 in major gameplay, rules and arts, which could not have been made independently.” The accusation was apparently convincing enough for authorities to raid the Dark and Darker developer's offices in early March 2023 and the game’s subsequent removal from Steam. Ironmace has now issued a statement addressing the situation saying, among many other things, that Nexon’s allegations are baseless.

In the message, Ironmace insists that it has no knowledge of any former P3 project member possessing or using stolen assets or other copyrighted material. Dark and Darker is a basic dungeon crawler, continues the statement, whose concept is “purposely traditional and generic” and can be found in many fantasy games. To bolster this claim, Ironmace asked ChatGPT to create a description for a basic PvP dungeon crawling game, and the results were very similar to the description of Dark and Darker.

The developer also claims to have used as many store-bought assets as possible to create Dark and Darker, which was built using Unreal Engines 4 and 5. The goal was to reduce development time because 3D in-game objects tend to be the most costly in terms of both money and work hours required. This information was provided to refute Nexon’s assertion that there was no way the demo version of Dark and Darker could have been completed within 10 months of the company’s founding. Ironmace has also said that it will soon be releasing evidence that shows precisely how the game was built "so quickly and efficiently Dark And Darker Gold for sale."