The downfall of Ashes of Creation-one of the most ambitious crowdfunded MMORPGs-has taken a far uglier turn after major allegations from a key investor. Jason Caramanis claims the project’s founder and creative director, Steven Sharif, ran a years-long multi-million-dollar scheme that ultimately pushed Intrepid Studios over the edge only two months after the game’s early access launch.
Caramanis, a veteran investor who says he lost $12.5 million, argues that Ashes of Creation had been teetering for a long time. In an interview with YouTube creator NefasQS, he describes what he calls a web of broken promises, financial opacity, and manipulation that allegedly impacted private investors, employees, and the game’s backers. At the center of his accusations is Steven Sharif, whom Caramanis portrays as having never put in personal capital despite publicly claiming otherwise.
One of the most serious claims is that Sharif never contributed his own money to Intrepid Studios, even though he had spoken publicly about investing between $30 million and $60 million. Caramanis says recently obtained QuickBooks documents suggest that, instead, Sharif and his partner John Moore were paying themselves salaries of roughly $500,000 a year while the studio stayed afloat on investor cash, bank loans, and public funds – a mix Caramanis argues could even raise federal issues.
The Ashes of Creation Studio Was Burning Cash
Caramanis also contends that the total amount of funding was far higher than what had been communicated. His estimate puts the project at around $140 million when combining Kickstarter money, Commerce Bank loans, U.S. small-business support programs, and large private injections made during the later years of development. He claims the biggest single contribution reached about $80 million, an attempt to rescue a company that, according to internal data cited in the article, had been technically insolvent for years.
Lack of governance is another pillar of the account, alongside spending that Caramanis describes as unsustainable. In 2025, monthly expenses reportedly exceeded $2.5 million, while revenue from in-game purchases sat at only about $150,000 to $200,000. The fallout included unpaid wages, development delays, and lawsuits – such as a claim filed by SADA Systems for more than $850,000 in unpaid Google Cloud services.
The breaking point, as described in the piece, arrived in early 2026, when an investor proposed a drastic restructuring to keep the company alive. Sharif rejected the plan and, Caramanis alleges, effectively steered the business into bankruptcy by requesting from Valve the revenue generated by Ashes of Creation’s early access, then using that money to pay off a personal loan tied to his home. With the intellectual property no longer in Sharif’s hands and multiple legal actions potentially on the way, the future of the IP is now unclear.
Source: 3DJuegos
