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Ashes of Creation was a giant scam?
Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 17-02-2026
Online Games Bay
Ashes of Creation, a very successful Kickstarter project just collapsed in a spectacular way and the fallout that will follow sounds interesting.
Ashes of Creation was yet another successful Kickstarter project that promised an MMO RPG game with collecting resources and... blah blah blah, same old, same old. They gathered a lot of money (over 3 million USD) and, according to Steven Sharif, who was the creative director behind the project, that money and his own investment will cover the production costs.
The whole development team was fired early this year, just 2 weeks after the premiere on Steam, Steven Sharif himself resigned (allegedly) in protest. Unfortunately, it seems like Steven Sharif was not exactly honest regarding the finances behind the project, as it is reported now, a lot of money (allegedly dozens of millions of dollars) were pumped into it by private investors. What is more, it is being reported that Steven Sharif himself did not contribute a single penny into the project.
To make things a bit more spicy, upcoming lawsuits allege that Steven Sharif defrauded a lot of that investment money and use them for personal gains (including hefty wages for himself and his partner, to pay off the house). The early access premier on Steam seems like it was a desperate attempt to avoid the total collapse of the project and an escape route for Steven Sharif to avoid even more lawsuits. The new owner of the project, also sued Steven Sharif, so... it might be interesting to see the further development.
As it was reported, Steven Sharif is an entrepreneur active in the MLM products (multi-level marketing, which is an umbrella term that often covers pyramid-schemes) and some of the private investors are people who made money through MLM projects... Wait, really? And someone actually gave money to a guy involved in MLMs??? In that case, fair enough, nothing to see here, just a project that ended up as well as it could have.
17-02-2026
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