Online games news
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
FUEL Basketball reaches 1.0 status
New online basketball manager game FUEL Basketball just reached the 1.0 status, which means that in 6 months the game moved from early alpha to a completely playable title. Take notes CD Projekt RED, take notes...
Ubisoft just keeps sinking lower and lower
When you thought that the moment Ubisoft’s shares reached the rock bottom was bad, or the moment they had to sell all of their most valuable assets to the new investors was bad, no one could predict they can sink any lower, right? Well, there was some development in that matter...
I’m with stupid
It seems like the media in the gaming industry has still a lot to learn from the examples such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Anthem - hype is not everything. Why do I mention it? No, I’m not gonna talk about Cyberpunk 2077 again, some other title caught my attention and by pure coincidence it was a Polish game as well.
Steam is sinking
Steam has made some poor choices in the past, and it seems like they are coming back to bite them on the backside. And it is not even funny any more.
Is Dark and Darker finally dead?
Is the long forgotten Dark and Darker drama finally over? It is. At least when it comes to Epic Store.
Aggregate scores - how is this still a thing?
If you browse through any of many websites offering users chance to vote for the games you will notice one interesting thing - even though the scale is usually between 1 and 10 it is hard to find a game that would be outside of the range between 6 and 9.
