Intrepid Studios has apparently shut down, leaving MMORPG fans wondering if they will get their refund after supporting Ashes of Creation.
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Over the weekend, sharp-eyed gamers noticed that many Intrepid Studios employees had changed their LinkedIn status to “Open For Work.” A telling post from Director of Communications and Marketing Margaret Krohn on January 31st said the “chapter was coming to a close.” After emotionally thanking the Ashes of Creation community, she said she doesn’t “have the words” and this “wasn’t what [she] expected.”
This was followed by a Discord message from Intrepid Studios’ CEO and founder Steven Sharif that essentially solidified the studio’s closing. He said that “control of the company” had shifted away from him and the board was making decisions he “could not ethically agree” with.
“As a result, I chose to resign in protest rather than lend my name or authority to decisions I could not ethically support,” Sharif wrote to fans. “Following my resignation, much of the senior leadership team resigned.”
This led the board to make mass layoffs. Sharif didn’t want to go into further detail since there are ongoing legal matters between him and the board. However, he told the let-down players that he was “incredibly dismayed” by how it all went down.
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On February 2nd, the studio will send a WARN Act to all employees, letting them go and shutting down operations. Meanwhile, payroll scheduled for February 1st was allegedly unable to be processed due to the company’s financial constraints.
In late 2025, Ballard Spahr of Sara Systems LLC issued an $850,000 lawsuit against Intrepid Studios. The cloud provider is alleging that Intrepid Studios has nearly $1 million in unpaid fees. As speculations began that Ashes of Creation was a possible near-debt scam that jumped onto Discord in a last-ditch effort to make more money from gamers, Sharif claimed that contract disputes are “common” in business. He said that the matter will likely be dissolved.
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In the original Kickstarter campaign from 2016 to 2017, Sharif promised to refund all backers in full if the game didn’t launch. While this was not a legally binding statement, many gamers are wondering whether Sharif rushed to release the game on Steam to get around the previous statement. Now that the game has made it to Steam, albeit unfinished, Sharif wouldn’t feel morally obligated to give back the millions his studio made from it.
On social media, Ashes of Creation backers are still demanding a refund. A lot of gamers spent thousands on the game, between the $500 package and in-game cosmetics. While others are calling these backers “suckers” for supporting a game that seemed so blatantly suspicious, it still hasn’t taken the heat off Sharif.
At this point, it doesn’t seem likely that Ashes of Creation supporters will get any of their money back. It’s perfectly legal for a Kickstarter project to shut down even after raising money, although if there is proven misconduct, a refund could be possible. However, this level of grift – going on 10 years – seems pretty tricky to navigate and legally prove.
[I’ve not quoted the entire article, just the parts I found most pertinent]
[My own comment:]
… yup.
That’s all, folks!
Game over.
Seems worth noting that… as best I can tell, there is no board of directors.
The whole point of AoC’s funding model… was to avoid having a board to answer to.
… ???
UPDATE:
Ok, I’m watching Kira’s video on this now as well.
Apparently,… there is a board.
He’s being sparse with details, to not get into legal trouble, to not overstep, but he’s saying he’s gotten a good deal of info leaked to him…
“You’re going to find out there was a board.”
He’s focusing on how badly all the employees have been fucked, how there seems to have been some kind of corporate coup, that the game is now owned by a private equity group, that the original dev team has essentially all been fired without warning, development has been outsourced to some overseas team, and that we should wait for more facts.
I was interested in AoC as I prefer sandbox MMOs. I just can’t play themepark MMORPGs, I always feel like I would be better of playing a single player RPG or multiplayer game of a different genre.
That being said their monetisation policies were a massive red flag (including selling Star Citizen style JPEGs of MMORPG items) and their CEO was disengagous.
I would much rather AoC was a success, I would even be willing to try out a 1.0 release, but such a complex sandbox MMO is difficult to implement form a financial perspective if you have ~250 employees based in the US (and in a very expensive region too).
I was actually kinda excited about this one from what I’d seen. Bummer.
I was once hopeful for it too, but I never actually played or spent money on it.
When they switched to the kind of ongoing, pay a stupid amount of money for the privilege of being an alpha tester thing, because you’ll get exclusive stuff that’ll be either impossible or very difficult to get in the early game… that kind of StarCitizen-like funding…
…at that point I wrote it off as “best case: development hell forever, worst case: eventual total implosion.”
It still is sad to see though, it really does seem like there will never be another major MMO that is any kind of compelling or novel, that isn’t monetized p2w … it apparently just costs too much money to develop one.
On that note: I wonder if the MxO emulator is still being developed…
EDIT: Apparently no, not really.
Yeah, MMOs are by far the most expensive type of game to develop, generally speaking, especially if you’re trying to do anything that resembles modern. It’s pretty cheap to do something like RPGMO, but something like the big names? You’re looking at amounts of money that most people will never see
People bought in on a product called “Ashes of Creation”? Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s a good thing I trusted my instinct on that one. Any MMO with a ‘founders pack’ prior to release is a scam, or if it’s not a scam, it says that the developers have no faith in their product and want your money now while they don’t have to actually deliver anything of note.
I played about 19 hours on the steam beta launch, I enjoyed it for the most part. I fell off playing it though.
Well best of luck with a refund attempt, I guess?
