Ashes of Creation, an ambitious, grand, promising MMORPG that was supposed to bring sweeping innovations to the genre, is likely dead following a mysterious exodus of its developers. Intrepid Studios’ chief executive, Steven Sharif, said board decisions were to blame, though the only board members are himself and his partner.
In a very strange turn of events, Ashes of Creation might be as dead as they come amid a massive layoff at its developer, Intrepid Studios. In a Discord message shared with players, chief executive Steven Sharif briefly explained the situation at the studio after fans started noticing studio executives switching to “open to work” on LinkedIn, wccftech writes.
It would tremendously take away from the message if I were to truncate it, so here it is in full:
“I can make a limited statement in my personal capacity and not on behalf of the company, regarding the situation. Control of the company shifted away from me, and the Board began directing actions that I could not ethically agree with or carry out.
“As a result, I chose to resign in protest rather than lend my name or authority to decisions I could not ethically support. Following my resignation, much of the senior leadership team resigned. Following those departures, the Board made the decision to issue WARN Act notices and proceed with a mass layoff.”
Sharif seems to have been pressured by a company board into performing (possibly financial?) decisions he did not agree with, prompting his and many other resignations at the company, and the subsequent mass firing of lower-level staff. This wouldn’t be the first time something like this had happened in a game development studio or any other form of company, though what’s strange is that the only board members at Intrepid Studios are Sharif himself and his husband, CFO John Moore.
It would then mean that Sharif and Moore, the sole board members, pressured themselves into performing actions they themselves did not agree with. If anyone took over the company in the meantime, as Sharif seems to suggest, that wasn’t filed with the State of California, where Intrepid Studios is based.
However, the filing, shared among users on the Ashes of Creation subreddit, seems to only include executive directors, while any potential investors, stockholders, or other funders could be listed elsewhere as non-executive directors. Whether or not they could have had the power to perform a takeover of Intrepid Studios is, as of yet, unclear.
Sharif also previously claimed, as archived by a Reddit user, that Intrepid Studios isn’t “governed by greedy ‘corporate overlords,'” and that he alone was “funding the project,” meaning there were “no investors or a board to answer to, no publisher to appease.”
Ashes of Creation has been in development since at least 2016 and secured millions in funding on Kickstarter in 2017. It promised to change the MMORPG genre by giving players total freedom in how they shape their own world. However, though it did receive a lot of updates and improvements over the years, its 2025 early access launch was met with a lukewarm to negative response, with bugs, incomplete features, and a lack of content being major complaints.
It didn’t survive even two months in Steam early access, it would appear, and it’s likely we’ll be hearing of its total cancellation sometime soon.
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