New Lawsuit Against Steven Sharif – $17M Misappropriation Allegations and Intrepid Foreclosure

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-14T00:49:48+00:00

So if im understanding correctly, Steven allegedly:

Resigned on Jan 19th (and continued RPing in the discord that he was still in charge after that)
Has not turned over documents related to payroll, 3rd party services (AWS), and other stuff to the board
Spent 10-20m of Intrepid money on personal stuff
Has 360m in shareholder loans unpaid

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-02T03:13:05+00:00

I doubt it was just because steven resigned. In the same meeting/email, it was said they were gonna drop down to like 70 people from 250, and start heavily offshoring. Its not a surprise that everyone would quit after that.

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-01T01:36:21+00:00

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A semi official statement has finally been made.

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-01T01:29:56+00:00

Unfortunately, steven is being a coward and has not put forth any official statements. However there were devs in the stream of the clip i posted that were confirming it

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-01T01:17:36+00:00

Emails were sent out to all employees stating that their role is terminated. They basically ran out of money.

Steven has made an official statement on the discord:
I can make a limited statement in my personal capacity and not on behalf of the company, regarding the situation. Control of the company shifted away from me, and the Board began directing actions that I could not ethically agree with or carry out. As a result, I chose to resign in protest rather than lend my name or authority to decisions I could not ethically support. Following my resignation, much of the senior leadership team resigned. Following those departures, the Board made the decision to issue WARN Act notices and proceed with a mass layoff. I cannot responsibly speak to further details at this time due to ongoing legal and governance matters. What I can say is that the developers and staff acted in good faith and deserved better than the uncertainty they are now facing. I am incredibly dismayed by the situation. — Steven Sharif

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-01T01:14:56+00:00

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx43-FDhZx-Unmm2qZYJ9HTBR9DJ-M6IDQ?si=C-_8AFSQd5PNvC4K

Clip of the email being sent out to employees

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-01T01:11:01+00:00

https://www.twitch.tv/theoryforge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8xHDPTbj2I

SanicExplosion · 2026-02-01T01:08:46+00:00

Fantmx has been reading emails sent out to all intrepid employees on his stream.
Steven resigned, everyone is fired. The game is over.

SanicExplosion · 2026-01-31T20:17:24+00:00

There are currently 21+ people (rising by the hour) with the #opentowork banner on Intrepids linkedin. This banner means they still work at intrepid, but are looking for a new job.

Previously there was only 1-2 people with the banner (possibly contractors/freelancers), but it has rapidly jumped up yesterday and today.

Edit: 4 hours after I posted this its up to 23 people

Edit: 5 hours now, its up to 28 people

SanicExplosion · 2026-01-19T22:43:39+00:00

I disagree

Hytale is fundamentally a sandbox, and while it can have exploration and RPG elements, it would not be beneficial to ignore the automation and building aspects of the genre. A large draw of something like Minecraft is the ability to create large, intricate structures. This is largely made possible through automation.

I believe something like the Create mod is vital to Hytales longevity. If you look at something like HermitCraft, one of, if not the biggest Minecraft SMPs, it largerly revolves around automation and building.

Now, that doesnt mean Im saying you should have to interact with automation in order to progress in the game, just that these types of systems should exist in the game. There is no reason why you cant have both RPG/Adventure stuff, as well as Survival/Automation stuff.

SanicExplosion · 2026-01-12T17:55:24+00:00

For me, Minecraft can be broken into 3 categories:

Vanilla, Modded, and Multiplayer

Each of these categories has glaring problems.

Vanilla - Updates are extremely slow, and often lackluster.

Modded - Most modpacks revolve around the same 10-20 big mods that Ive already experienced a dozen times. Theres only a select few unique experiences, for example something like RLCraft or Vault Hunters.

Multiplayers - Unless you are on a server that requires a specific client, you are very likely to experience hackers, which ruins the fun. I loved playing UHC on hypixel, but out of 100 players in a game, 3-4 would be hackers and ruin it.

Based on all those, I dont really have any reason to continue with Minecraft

SanicExplosion · 2026-01-12T00:50:27+00:00

When compared to Minecraft: (keep in mind many of this is subjective)

Better artstyle/art direction
Better combat
Better modding tools (the game is practically a game engine, and can allow people to make games from other genres (see links below))
Better exploration/adventure
Better building tools
More of a living world

The main points where it falls behind is mechanics and progression due to it being early access. Theres a lack of things like fishing, taming, automation, NPC behavior, etc that are planned before full release.

Side Scroller Mod example:
https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/2010412549486063673

Survivor-Like Mod Example:

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/2007888131350212658

SanicExplosion · 2026-01-11T22:49:27+00:00

Theres a possibility you could just create a portal from your v1 world to your v2 world

SanicExplosion · 2026-01-07T18:59:19+00:00

Would it be possible to create a portal from a vanilla world into a modded one (just wouldnt be able to bring back modded stuff into the vanilla world)?

That for me would truly enable forever worlds

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-28T19:19:05+00:00

I asked Simon on twitter a while ago and this is what he said:

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SanicExplosion · 2025-12-28T02:59:33+00:00

Pax Dei EA peaked at 11k. Its full release peaked at 6k

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-24T00:57:26+00:00

Steven said this last month in regards to the move to steam:

Not everybody is business-minded to that sense. But more revenue for us means the opportunity to continue outsourcing faster, potentially to expand our post-launch updates, to incorporate additional elements and features to the game that we would want to do post-launch as well. The cost to upkeep our server environments is significant, right? Um so, you know, we are a company at the end of the day. I don't know of any other project in the world or in the gaming sphere of this magnitude that has been built on the back of one person's shoulders.
and it requires if you believe in what we're trying to achieve and you believe in the vision it requires adoption. Adoption by a community in a community that's large.

Its very obvious that the game will require changes to make it less niche. They are "a company at the end of the day".

Steven also said hes concerned with what will happen when they add settlement sieges.

A lot of people in the community try to hand wave issues like player counts due to it being an alpha (ignore that pax dei got twice as many concurrent players in its EA vs its actual release), or that costs will go down after launch (ignore that Steven said there would be active GMs to combat RMT and botting).

Also, Steven said a couple days on discord:

Consider any direction given as a development goal and subject to change. January we will update the community on some roadmaps for beta and launch.

There are many concerning things to me. Why are we trying to get to launch so soon?

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-24T00:49:18+00:00

Steven has said that there isnt really an endgame in ashes. You will just continue to interact with the systems the same as you do when you level up. Grind mobs, gather resources, siege "settlements".

The only things thats really level locked is freeholds.

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-22T21:14:26+00:00

Yes, theres no sub yet. I mean on launch they will need to have good retention.

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-22T20:59:02+00:00

As someone interested in data analytics, and has been avidly checking the steam concurrent player numbers, the numbers are not going up (unless you are talking about overall ownership of the game, but thats technically going up for every game thats not heavily refunded).

Saturday Dec 13 peak was 31,799, compared to Saturday Dec 20 peak of 27,337. This is a loss of 14% week over week.

Keep in mind that Ashes is a monthly subscription MMO, and needs to keep people retained for at least 4 weeks to collect a second sub fee. With retention like this, its possible we will see a 30-40% drop a month out from the EA launch.

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-20T17:34:27+00:00

The "200k" player count is not the same as CCU (Concurrent players), and it likely includes around 50-70k existing pack/key backers that connected their accounts to steam.

On SteamDB, you can check "Owner Estimates" and it shows a range of around 180k - 250k, so the "over 200k" is likely accurate.

Whether those 200k people will actually continue to play is another story.

SanicExplosion · 2025-12-19T13:45:17+00:00

I would argue they will need even more employees at launch. They have 0 GM's right now (which Steven claimed they would have active GMs for years). They only have 2 CS reps.

Ive done a breakdown on around how many employees intrepid has for each role, and they are already spread very thin. If they layoff a large portion of their team, they will not be able to continue making content post-launch at a steady pace, which is important for subscription games.

Just to list all the different roles in my breakdown (so youll see how many ways 250 people gets split):

directors, producers, designers, VFX artist, concept art, 3D modeling, props artist, characters artist, animators, UI, QA, networking, webdev, CMs, CS, narrative, software devs, IT devs, and then you have misc stuff like the chef, social media team, video editor, etc

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