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.
The cloud provider is alleging that Intrepid Studios has nearly $1 million in unpaid fees.
Good lord. The cloud is a fucking scam for most people and they’re just too stupid to realize it.
I recommend everyone get practice with self-hosting so you can see firsthand how easy it is. You get to own your hardware, and the main cost is bandwidth. There’s no way this project was using a million dollars worth of resources. They were probably too stupid/inexperienced to realize they were getting taken for a ride.
Oh shit, this game always looked like a scam. Everyone I knew who supported it was a MAGA-esque retard.
Took me a second to recognize it. I thought this was that other game that’s essentially used to benchmark computers with a bunch of particles flying across the screen.
Meanwhile, Star Citizen recently upped the player limit of their servers to like 600 or so. Kinda funny watching internet predictions of the past come true or not.
Josh Strife Hayes recently did a video of basically ‘why do we keep getting indie MMOs that promise the moon and then basically rugpull everyone?’, and I also saw like an hour long video from another creator, a longtime WoW player, who more or less argued that WoW Classic objectively sucks and I can prove it.
To try and paraphrase/synthesize their points, there are basically a few reasons why MMOs so often seem to be full of chuds:
The MMORPG crowd is basically the same group of people that it has been for the last 25 years. There aren’t really too mant new, younger players … joining into an older school MMO style game, they play Fortnite or ARC Raiders or whatever Live Service Hero shooter.
This is an older crowd that really really likes very very simple and repetetive gameplay. You just have to understand a bit of an optimization strategy, but after that, actual gameplay is incredibly monotonous compared to many other kinds of games.
That is to say: the grind is the point. The very very simple gameplay loops are the point.
Also, what this crowd is doing is fundamentally trying to establish or join a social group where they get to feel important by virtue of usually just senoirity in terms of time spent, given that the actual skill ceiling is pretty low, the gameplay is essentially sophmoric.
They’re chasing a dream, an actual alternate reality, where they will be cool and awesome.
So… yeah, simple repetetive gameplay appeals to simpletons.
Fantasy worlds where you are important and respected for basically just being there… appeal to economically and socially disaffected people.
Simpletons who are economic and social outcasts.
… otherwise known as someone highly likely to find fascism to be an appealing ideology, and/or be easily brainwashed into supporting it.
These are the idiot suckers who can’t think very well and don’t think they should have to, the prime suckers who will constantly get got by so many kinds of scams and grifters that ultimately, sell them a sense of superiority and respect.
Just like every other early access title, spending more money than the most basic of spend on stuff like this is insane.
I’m still laughing at the clowns paying $100 for hytale without any real proof of development cadence. Skins never stop being sold and that’s all you get…
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 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
… By RPGMO, do you mean MMORPG?
I’ve not heard the term RPGMO before.
And … yeah while it absolutely is the case that MMOs are basically the most expensive kind of game to develop…
Well, no, they’re not actually.
That’d be basically AAA live service games.
Which… kinda just is sorta technically an MMO, in a way, in terms of the amount of content and required ongoing server infrastructure.
So the money for this exists.
And also… I remember the early 00s. We had a bunch of fairly big, and also actually fairly novel and distinct kinds of MMOs coming out, fairly regularly.
While yes, the idea of crowdfunding a modern MMO is… probably always going to be dubious… I think this is more a case that investors have a hardon for essentially variants of Overwatch, they’re allergic to MMOs, unless they make them insanely pay to win or gacha or something like that…
… and we just generally have a lack of people willing to try and re-envision what a new MMO could be, while also having the systemic integrity to actually make the underlying systems work together.
By RPGMO, do you mean MMORPG?
No, RPG MO (forgot there was a space there) is an MMORPG. It’s also on Steam if you want to see videos/screenshots
Well, no, they’re not actually.That’d be basically AAA live service games.
I more meant as a genre. Everything gets more expensive when you get into the AAA world, but that’s more a matter of scale than genre. There are probably some single player games that have cost more than some MMOs have cost the devs over the life of the game :P
And also… I remember the early 00s. We had a bunch of fairly big, and also actually fairly novel and distinct kinds of MMOs coming out, fairly regularly.
Same! I kinda miss those days for MMOs. Some of those are still hanging around, but a lot of the ones I used to play are just shells of what they used to be. Perfect World, Conquer Online, FlyFF… Well, FlyFF was never that good. Damn lootboxes.
they’re allergic to MMOs, unless they make them insanely pay to win or gacha or something like that…
Yeah, it’s partly because most MMOs aren’t that profitable, at least without p2w/gacha mechanics. It’s due, at least in part, to the nature of MMOs.
Generally with theme park MMOs (Final Fantasy, Runescape, GW2, etc) there comes a point where the player runs out of content, or burns out. At that point they switch to doing something else, and stop paying you money, even if just for a while. Some will stick around, but most will move to another game, usually one with more money, and a larger dev team, that can release content faster. Through a few cycles of this, smaller studios are often choked out of resources, because while server costs go down during slow times, it’s not proportional to the amount of money lost. Each additional player is cheap, but the base dev+server costs aren’t, at least for a game that’s trying to compete with the big ones.
People bought in on a product called “Ashes of Creation”? Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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 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?
