MMORPG fans had high hopes for Ashes of Creation, but then it launched and quickly shut down merely 2 months after its release, leaving enraged players to review-bomb the game that raised $3.2 million on Kickstarter.

Its CEO, Steven Sharif, resigned and filed a lawsuit against Intrepid Studios' Board of Directors soon after, accusing it of "breaches of fiduciary duty, violations of federal and state trade secret laws, and wrongful efforts to seize company assets, including its valuable IP, through an unlawful and manufactured insider foreclosure."

The whole thing is a big mess that became even worse when investigative gaming journalist NefasQS revealed an alleged ledger that points to Sharif and his husband, John Moore, using the studio's money to fund their "lavish lifestyle" (again, allegedly).

The studio's ledger contains "expenses paid and deposits that paint a troubling picture of a company that was on the threshold of financial death at multiple points in its history" from 2015 to 2026, according to NefasQS.

The spreadsheet shows many questionable transactions, including payments made to a personal chef, auction sites, as well as cigar and TCG sellers. One curious recipient of Intrepid's money is Gore Oil, which, NefasQS says, received $81,166.Apparently, Gore Oil was the deed owner of Sharif and Moore’s $4.9 million mansion.

NefasQS also mentioned how Sharif's and John Moore's wages spiked almost twice in number in 2024, eventually jumping to over $400,000 for each man in 2025.

Altogether, this seems like a typical case of fraud and careless spending of the studio's money, which Sharif, of course, calls fake.

He claims that there was no misappropriation of Kickstarter funds and all the "lavish lifestyle" allegations are "categorically false."

"An examination of the facts through the judicial process has already revealed that the parties behind these claims orchestrated an unlawful foreclosure to take control of Intrepid’s assets from the people who built Ashes of Creation, with the intent to exploit those assets for their own benefit," Sharif said.

It looks like he, or someone on his side, is set on erasing NefasQS's video, as the creator reported that someone already filed a privacy complaint against his video and reported his Reddit account. However, we all know that the internet remembers everything, and it might be hard to get over this mishap.

Then again, you never know who's right or wrong during a legal war.

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