Is Ashes of Creation Over? Intrepid Studios Shuts Down, Steam Removes the Game from Sale

Honestly, the story of Ashes of Creation feels like a splash of cold water. Everything fell apart in just a couple of days. First, employees at Intrepid Studios received WARN Act notices about mass layoffs — and that was already a serious red flag. By the evening of February 2, the studio had effectively ceased to exist. That was it. Full stop. And along with it, it seems, the game itself — the one that had carried so many plans and expectations for years — slipped into oblivion.

Steam’s reaction was swift and somewhat ruthless — the game’s store page was simply removed. As if it had never been there. Expansions are still floating around on the official website, but you can no longer purchase the base game: click the link and you’re redirected to Steam, where the buy button is gone. It leaves a strange feeling, honestly. It brings back memories of other Early Access projects that built up hype and then quietly vanished. The most obvious example is The Day Before. The scale may be different, but the aftertaste is similar — especially for those who believed in the project and put their money down early.

Right now, the communities are anything but calm. On Steam, Discord, and Reddit, players report that refunds are being handled manually. If you bought the game recently or played less than two hours, it’s relatively straightforward — the standard process applies and the money is refunded to your wallet. But if you’ve logged more time or purchased it long ago, it turns into back-and-forth emails with support, explanations, and plenty of frustration. Support seems willing to help, but it’s neither fast nor particularly smooth.

As for what happens next — it’s all fog. No clear answers about the servers, the codebase, or the future of the game itself. Will the project be sold? Rebranded and relaunched? For now, silence. Meanwhile, financial troubles are surfacing. Debts. Lawsuits. In December, Sara Systems LLC filed a claim for nearly $850, 000 over unpaid cloud services. That’s not exactly pocket change.

And back in 2017, Steven Sharif raised over three million dollars on Kickstarter, promising refunds if the game never launched. Technically, that promise was fulfilled — Ashes of Creation did release into Early Access on December 11, 2025.

But it stayed afloat for just over a month… and that was it.

Years of anticipation, discussion, ambition — and this is how it ends. It’s hard not to feel at least a little sad. Even if the project wasn’t perfect, you could sense there was an attempt to build something big. In the end, though, all that remains is silence — and a missing store page.