Daily Archives: February 3, 2026

Ashes of Creation – The Kickstarter Curse Set to Claim Another Project

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These are our promises to you:

*To continue our open development process with you, our backers, on our website and Discord channels.

*And finally, in the case that Ashes of Creation does NOT launch, we promise to refund all backers in full.

–Ashes of Creation Kickstarter Campaign

So, does going early access on Steam count as a launch?  My guess is that the heads of Intrepid Studios are going to say yes.  Of course, who is running the show currently is an open question.

Coming Soon – The Ashes of the Ashes of Creation

Rumors started running on Saturday night, fueled by Steven Sharif announcing on the official Discord that he was resigning, that the studio was facing a massive layoff, and that the game was effectively going to be shut down.  Sharif posted:

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. I cannot responsibly speak to further details at this time due to ongoing legal and governance matters. What I can say is that the developers and staff acted in good faith and deserved better than the uncertainty they are now facing. I am incredibly dismayed by the situation.

Was he giving us advanced notice of the bad news or merely trying to preserve his reputation in the face of a poor turn of events?  He has aggressively tried to control the narrative in the past, demanding a retraction of an article over at PC Gamer when the site questioned (and verified with Kickstarter) changes to their referral program.  Not his only bit of drama, but one that sprang to mind for me.

So color me skeptical of any story he is pushing until it has something of substance backing to it, because I sure didn’t see any viral warning posts from him about ethics two months ago when Ashes of Creation went to early access on Steam.

Quite the opposite.  This move was to expand their audience.

So now we have the MMO with the highest Kickstarter backing amount going tits up and apparently having put in the effort to get onto Steam to avoid having to pay refunds… not that they would have in any case.  That promise was as empty as any corporate promise known to man.

A reminder of the backing hall of fame:

Of those, only Project: Gorgon can likely be deemed a full success, having arrived at a launch and delivering as promised… more than promised really.

Yes, Shroud of the Avatar got shoved out the door when Lord British, only tangentially involved at best, got bored of the whole thing and walked away.  So it did, in fact, ship.  But if you believe that SotA is the spiritual successor to the Ultima series that was promised by the addled brained Richard Garriott, then I fear either him or you… or possibly both… have an extremely low opinion of that series.

Then there is Star Citizen, a financial success by any accounting.  It has made Chris Roberts rich.  It is, however, still in protective alpha status, so as to deflect criticism of missing features and broken promises.  It will get credit when it says it is live and not a day before.

And the rest of that list… Crowfall crowfell back in 2022, never to return, while Mark Jacobs keeps delaying the inevitable public failure of Camelot Unchained by finding more suckers to fund him.

There are others, of course.  Those are just the big ones to which I have paid some attention.  I commented on an article elsewhere about the low success rate of Kickstarted MMORPGs… and then one of the four “successes,” Dual Universe, went offline after that.

It did so in the most graceful way possible, but it still could not maintain itself as a live service title.

Granted, the video game industry in general, and the MMORPG niche in particular, is in something of a crisis with investors bailing, games being shut down or cancelled, and the threat of AI slop destroying the value of it all hanging over everything.

But not you Stars Reach, I’m sure you’ll be just fine!  (At least until we see the actual business model.)

Anyway!

Ashes of Creation looks to be joining the list of failed Kickstarter backed MMO projects will be a mere footnote in the history of the genre.  It would have been better to have been cancelled before any public viewing.  At least then you get to be the subject of awful, weak tea simperings about great MMOs killed before their time.

I swear, every article that laments Project Copernicus or Project Blackbird or Blizzard’s cancelled Titan project sets my teeth on edge as somebody spins a fairy tale about how great these projects they never touched would have been.

There will be no such lasting idolatry of Ashes of Creation.  Over on Steam its reviews have been mixed, with slightly less than half of those bothering to review giving the title a thumbs up.

Ashes of Creation on Steam

And that was on Sunday morning, before the news had really hit and sunk in.  If you go to the game’s page on Steam now you’ll find that the reviews have gone downhill since then, landing the recent reviews section in the “mostly negative” camp.

The latest director’s letter to the “citizens of Verra”, published late last week, was an address to player complaints about bugs, design, and botting issues, with a promise of a Twitch update on February 13 to go over the path forward.  I doubt we’ll be getting that now.

In the midst of all of this, as I am writing, the game itself remains available for purchase on Steam, no doubt a forgotten detail in all the internal drama at Intrepid.  I mean, they wouldn’t deliberately try to collect revenue on a title that was going to shut down, would they?

Addendum: The ability to purchase the title looks to have been removed at some point on Monday afternoon.

Addendum: There is also some question as to who the “board” consists of if not Steven Sharif.

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