• I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    3·
    2 months ago

    Stealing this comment from the link:

    Steven founded Intrepid Studios in 2015 and for years claimed to be the sole owner with no board and no investors. State filings confirm he was CEO, Director, and Secretary. His words: “I am the sole share owner in the company. I don’t have to answer to a board.” The 2017 Kickstarter raised $3.27M from nearly a 20k backers with an explicit promise: “In the case that Ashes of Creation does NOT launch, we promise to refund all backers in full.” Sharif personally guaranteed refunds from his own wealth in a PC Gamer interview.

    Despite claiming full funding, lawsuits piled up. Sada Systems sued for $850k in unpaid cloud fees. Aetna filed a debt collection suit. Streamline Media sued over unpaid battle royale assets. California EDD filed ~$50k in payroll tax liens starting in 2020. The Ya-Ya Legacy Trust, a 9.7% shareholder, sued in 2024 after being denied access to financial books and bank statements. Sharif’s other entity, Trek Holdings LLC, was suspended by the state.

    In November 2025, Sharif transferred his home to his spouse — asset protection before creditors arrived. On December 11, Intrepid rushed an unfinished Alpha 2 onto Steam Early Access, technically “launching” the game and voiding the Kickstarter refund promise. On January 16, 2026, Karen Boreyko — co-founder of Vemma, an MLM shut down by the FTC as a pyramid scheme, connected to Sharif through the XanGo/Vemma world — filed a UCC lien securing her claim on Intrepid’s assets. Layoffs began. On January 31, Sharif resigned via Discord blaming “the board” for unethical decisions. WARN Act notices followed. The studio couldn’t make payroll.

  • Ghostie@lemmy.zip
    2·
    2 months ago

    I’ve been playing the game as a community tester since the start of alpha 2 (before steam EA). I had taken a break to let the game cook and to address the intel CPU voltage nonsense on my end. I had about 120 hours or so by that time. A year later, I picked it up back when it became available on steam to see the state of the game. Many of the main systems that served as selling points of the game still had yet to be implemented. After an additional 130 hours I noticed that the lion’s share of bugs that were around in alpha 2 were still present. It’s strange to me how a year of dev time didn’t address any of the bugs the player-base was actively reporting but since there was more of the game’s map available and adjustment to some systems that had issues in the prior phase, I couldn’t say they didn’t do anything. Then I see this happen, which was kind of a shock given all communication with the community was business as usual up to the day before this story dropped. Looking back in retrospect, a lot of quirks of intrepid’s behavior line up with the details coming to the surface now as this unfolds. Since these developments on the business end can’t happen over night given the bureaucratic nature of filings and such, I suspect this was the plan in works months ago. It explains why development on crucial things fell by the wayside (they tried to explain it away as “development takes time and we are a small team”).