Hi there, We removed Dark and Darker from sale on the Epic Games Store on March 5 in consideration of a court decision in Korea between Nexon and the game's publisher, IRONMACE. On November 1, 2025, we will be removing Dark and Darker from your library, at which point it will no longer be playable via the Epic Games Store.
Effective immediately, players can no longer purchase Redstone Shards or the Legendary Status upgrades via the Epic Games Store. Players can continue to use the Redstone Shards that they have previously purchased until November 1, 2025.
We will issue a refund to all players who have purchased the Legendary Status upgrade. Refunds will be issued to the player’s original payment method, and where that’s not possible, players will receive a refund to their Epic account balance. We are unable to provide refunds on Redstone Shards.
If you have not received a refund by July 1, please contact player support.
Thank you,
The Epic Games Store team
That is not universally true. On GOG for example you can download all your games, so things like this could not happen there. Sure, you still technically purchase a license and do not actually buy the games, but for all intents and purposes this is still the closest you get to actually owning the games.
Sure you get a DRM-free license on GOG, but for many games you are still dependent on online servers for authentication, which can be shut down at any time rendering your access null and void. The only recourse is technically "hacking" a game a creating local servers which is both against terms of service and against the law in some countries.
I am not aware of any game on GOG that requires an online server for authentication. I'm not saying no such thing exists - I don't own every single game on GOG, but that would go against the whole DRM free thing. Care to name a few games that do this? I don't mean games that have an online mode that require a server, but games that just require authentication against an online server to be able to play the game.
You are talking about always-on DRM, I was talking about dependence on the servers for connecting to the multiplayer. Most of GOG games lose partial funtionality when servers get shut down as GOG doesn't use/host their own servers.
You specifically said "online servers for authentication". That's what I understood as just that - a server required to be able to play the game, not a server required to use an actual online feature of a game. Don't get me wrong, I very much prefer when games allow multiplayer games without requiring a server run by the publisher. All that is very different from what the posts title is about, though.
By the way, there are still games on GOG that let you run local servers for multi player gaming.
And then continued in the next sentence. In context it makes sense, without it I can understand your confusion.
And I'm not trying to attack GOG, just highlighting the reality of online "onwership" in general. GOG and Itch.io are the best we can get without real regulations.
There are some great open source games (like !bar@discuss.tchncs.de), but it's still very rare.