Intrepid Studios is facing turmoil after a public clash between the studio’s creative director for the MMORPG Ashes of Creation and the company’s board of directors, the studio’s CEO, Steven Sharif, said in a message posted on a Discord server.
According to Sharif, the board had begun to insist on actions he considered ethically unacceptable. The creative director refused to carry out those directives and submitted a resignation in protest. His departure was followed by the exit of numerous senior developers. Shortly after those departures, Intrepid’s management announced wide-ranging layoffs. It remains unclear how many developers will stay with the company and whether active development on the MMORPG will continue.
Following Sharif’s message, many fans accused the studio of misleading players and extracting funds from the community. During the project’s long development cycle, players could buy access keys to alpha tests that ran in multi-month periods; those keys reportedly ranged from roughly $50 to $500 depending on the package. The studio also sold battle passes and limited armor bundles priced in the range of about $5–$25.
Sharif had previously asserted that the studio was fully funded and capable of completing the game, and that he managed the project personally without oversight from any board of directors. The recent account from Sharif, however, indicates a sharp breakdown in governance and internal agreement.
Ashes of Creation is built on Unreal Engine 5 and markets itself on a dynamic world that reacts to player actions, with settlements and regions that evolve over time. The project was announced in 2016 and launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in 2017; that campaign raised approximately $3.2 million against an initial goal of $750,000.
In 2019 the studio released Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse, a free battle‑royale title intended as a testbed for PvP systems. The MMORPG later arrived on a major PC storefront in December 2025 with a price around 1,600 Russian rubles; at launch its peak concurrent player count reached roughly 31,000 users.
Sharif’s post was made on Discord; that service is blocked in Russia by a government decision, which affected visibility of the announcement there. Intrepid Studios has not released further detailed figures about staff numbers or a concrete roadmap for the project’s future.