It looks like the saga of the ambitious “MMORPG of dreams” Ashes of Creation is finally turning into a crime thriller. While Steven Sharif is exchanging claims with investors, YouTuber NefasQS published an exclusive material based on interviews with former employees of Intrepid Studios.
The author of the video collected testimonies from anonymous programmers, artists and managers who shed light on what was going on behind the closed doors of the studio. Extremely uncomfortable details emerged: from a personal chef at the company’s expense to sudden layoffs through strange letters in Latin. As it turned out, behind the façade of a “family atmosphere” and streams with developers, there was a dictatorship, financial fraud and a complete lack of a plan for releasing the game. Even the founder’s relatives did not stand aside – judging by new data, Stephen managed to fool even his own brother.
Below are all the main points and insights from this investigation:
- NefasQS gave the floor to former employees of Intrepid Studios, who turned out to be the most vulnerable party after the sudden closure of the MMORPG Ashes of Creation and the start of legal proceedings with the founder Stephen Sharif. At the time of publication of the video, none of the workers had received their due wages or compensation, which led to the filing of several class action lawsuits alleging violations of labor laws. All testimony from former programmers, artists, and community managers was completely anonymous to protect them from legal repercussions, potential aggression from an upset gaming community, and employer blacklisting.
- An unusual detail of corporate life was revealed. The company officially hired a personal chef to prepare three meals daily exclusively for Steven Sharif and John Moore at their private home. Management repeatedly promised employees that the chef would soon move into the office and provide the entire team with free breakfasts and lunches, but this never happened due to bureaucratic problems with setting up a commercial kitchen in the building. The author of the video was able to confirm the identity of this chef and the fact that he did list on his resume a job at Intrepid Studios as a culinary director for over two years, although the chef himself declined to comment for the video.
- The firing of the entire studio came via a strange email from a mysterious sender with the pseudonym Nihil Dicit, which is Latin for “he says nothing” and is a legal term applied to a party failing to respond to a subpoena. Later, a second letter arrived from the same address with typical corporate consolations and a statement that the salaries could have been paid if the Steam platform had not suddenly withheld the studio’s funds. Employees considered this anonymous method of mass dismissal extremely unprofessional, suggesting that it could have been a quiet protest from someone in HR or a mocking message from a person trying to escape justice in a country without an extradition treaty.
- Many employees emphasized that Steven Sharif had absolutely no experience in business management, showed dictatorial tendencies and demanded that no decision in the company be made without his personal approval under the threat of immediate dismissal. At the same time, the company founder himself and John Moore could disappear from the office without warning for several weeks or even a whole month, completely stopping the team’s work process. Sharif was also extremely emotionally unstable. He perceived the dismissal of employees at his own request as a personal insult, often cried because of this in the workplace and complained to the team that because of the worries he had lost sleep and appetite.
- The work process inside the studio was described as extremely chaotic. Stephen acted like a child playing developer, constantly interfering with work processes and forcing the team to transfer resources from one task to another at the very last moment. Many called the creation of the Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse project in the “Battle Royale” genre, which was officially announced as a testing ground for mechanics for two to three months, but in fact was developed for more than a year as a completely separate project on Unreal Engine, as a huge mistake and a waste of resources. According to the developers, this mode was created either to deceive inexperienced investors, or to secretly collect data from players, as the main MMO suffered from bloat in scale and unsuccessful attempts to combine a fleet simulator, a flight simulator, a sieges and a medieval simulator.
- Serious financial fraud and delays in payments began long before the studio closed. Salaries, which were supposed to arrive regularly on the 3rd and 17th of each month, were regularly delayed, and bonuses promised to developers for launching an alpha version were constantly postponed from Christmas to February and were ultimately never paid. CFO John Moore practically did not fulfill his direct duties, systematically ignored letters from employees with questions about salaries and was only involved in purchasing snacks and water, which is why, in order to simply pay for the necessary software, developers had to fish him out in the corridors for a corporate credit card. Despite the presence of outside accounting and law firms, Stephen publicly stated that the company was not obligated to listen to legal advice and regularly reassured the team with made-up stories about personally liquidating its cryptocurrency to ensure timely payments.
- Most of the employees were fully confident that the studio was completely independent, had no investors and was financed solely from Stephen’s personal multi-billion dollar funds for the sake of his love for the game ArcheAge, so for many it was a shock to learn about the existence of a certain third-party board of directors. It was this advice, according to the team, that insisted on the forced and unexpected launch of the game in paid early access on Steam and the opening of an in-game cosmetics store in order to urgently demonstrate to potential investors the financial viability of the project. At the end of January, Stephen became unavailable for contact, and on the 28th he announced his resignation to the team, citing health problems and allegedly illegal demands of the board of directors, although in his official lawsuit he indicated a completely different date of departure – January 19.
- The catastrophic impact of the studio’s closure has meant that some of the studio’s 200 highly skilled developers, many of whom previously worked for giants such as Blizzard, Sony, Gearbox and Infinity Ward, are now forced to live in their cars due to the inability to pay rent. Other employees were suddenly left without health insurance, putting their lives at direct risk by being unable to pay for critical medical care for themselves and their families. In order to somehow survive in this situation, 136 laid-off developers independently organized a closed mutual aid network, where they share food, raise funds, provide each other with legal advice, psychological support and help each other find a new job.
- In the first years of operation, the studio actively maintained the illusion of a warm family atmosphere. Stephen often played Magic the Gathering and poker with the team on Thursdays (even personally doubling the prize money out of his own pocket), held D&D sessions at his home, and also took part of the team at his own expense for a weekend in Las Vegas, from where employees once returned en masse with COVID-19. Staff regularly attended family outings to the Cineopolis cinema and participated in monthly luncheons where Stephen and John personally dressed up as Santa and an elf to hand out gifts to staff children. However, as soon as the studio switched to a remote work format, this atmosphere instantly evaporated, revealing a lack of professional management and real care for the team.
- There was some nepotism in the studio. Stephen had a friend with whom he was simply playing some online game together (in the video he is called “Mr. Tom”). He wanted to take him into his company and literally invented a position for him from scratch. Later, this Tom needed to move to another state to be with his wife. Stephen met him halfway, allowed him to work remotely from home and transferred him to the testing department. The main injustice that outraged the employees was that this “playmate” began to receive a salary almost twice as much as any other tester in the studio. That is, a person occupied a warm place and received almost double salary solely thanks to personal connections with the boss.
- Stephen’s manipulations even affected his own family. The investigation revealed that he had defrauded his older brother Tim Sharif, owner of 310 Nutrition. Stephen convinced him to invest in producing Ashes of Creation merchandise, using his brother’s business as a front. When legal troubles began, Tim became unfoundedly suspected of complicity, although in fact he himself was the victim of deception and lost money. Tim Sharif refused official comments, but the author confirmed that he was extremely dissatisfied with his brother’s actions and was not involved in the thefts.
- The most attentive workers openly suspected the project of fraud, pointing to hidden lists of unpaid contractor bills (including $850,000 in debt for SADA Systems cloud services) and Steven’s outright lies on monthly broadcasts, where he passed off broken and empty concepts as almost completed game features. There were strong suggestions that the game should never have made it to release at all, and endless development stages such as Alpha 1, Alpha 2, Alpha 3, Beta 1 and Beta 2 were invented literally on the fly in order to delay the finale as much as possible and collect more money.
Let’s remember that we previously published another analysis from YouTuber NefasQS (seasoned with information from Theory Forge), which talked about what happened behind the scenes of development. After this, it became known that Steven Sharif filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the Southern District of California against a group of investors.
