A copyright and trade secrets dispute between Nexon and Ironmace over Dark and Darker has been concluded at South Korea's Supreme Court. The court dismissed appeals from both sides, upholding a ruling by an appeals court.

The Supreme Court's Second Division, with Justice Park Young-jae as the presiding justice, on Wednesday dismissed appeals by both the plaintiff and defendants in a lawsuit filed by Nexon Korea against Ironmace, Mr Choi and others seeking an injunction over trade secrets infringement. The appeals court ruling ordering Ironmace to pay Nexon 5.8 billion won in damages was finalised.

The Supreme Court accepted the lower court's finding that the defendants infringed trade secrets including the P3 game's source code, graphic resources and game planning materials. It did not accept a copyright infringement claim, finding no substantial similarity between the P3 game and Dark and Darker. A request to ban the service was also rejected because the trade secrets protection period had already expired.

The Supreme Court cited the fact that the two games belong to different genres as the main basis for rejecting the copyright claim. It said the P3 game is in the battle royale genre, where the goal is survival, while Dark and Darker is an extraction shooter in which the goal is to acquire items and escape. The court ruled that differences in genre mean the organic combination of game components must differ, so substantial similarity cannot be recognised.

The damages amount of 5.8 billion won was calculated by applying the software industry's marginal profit rate of 84.23 percent and the P3 materials' contribution rate of 15 percent to Ironmace's sales generated during the trade secrets protection period, from July to August 2021 to Jan. 31, 2024.

Nexon said after the ruling that trade secrets infringement had been consistently recognised from the first trial through the Supreme Court. It said recognising core game development materials such as source code and build files as trade secrets would set an important precedent for protecting game developers' assets. It added it expected the ruling would be fully considered in the criminal case and that a reasonable conclusion would be reached.

Ironmace said the Supreme Court made clear through the ruling that Nexon's P3 game and Dark and Darker are not similar and that Ironmace did not improperly use Nexon's achievements. On the finding of trade secrets infringement, it described it as a ruling that diverged from the criminal case and expressed regret. It added it would prove its innocence to the end in the criminal trial and said it was glad it could provide the service in a stable manner.

The Suwon District Prosecutors Office's Seongnam Branch in February indicted without detention three people including Mr Choi and the corporate entity of Ironmace on charges of violating the Unfair Competition Prevention Act for leaking trade secrets, so the criminal trial will proceed separately.