New financial misconduct allegations have surfaced against Steven Sharif, the former CEO of Intrepid Studios, following a detailed YouTube report published on April 11 by the channel NefasQS. The report centers on how funds raised through the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter were allegedly spent.
Ashes of Creation is an MMORPG that raised $3.2 million on Kickstarter. The game was removed from Steam in February under disputed circumstances, and Sharif has since been locked in a legal dispute with Intrepid’s board of directors. With both parties offering conflicting accounts, the reliability of individual claims has been difficult to establish from the outside.
What the Ashes of Creation general ledger allegedly shows
NefasQS claims to have “obtained and processed the entire Intrepid Studios general ledger from 2015 to 2026,” which he says paints “a troubling picture of a company that was on the threshold of financial death at multiple points in its history.” He says the data was verified through multiple sources and interviews with former employees.
According to the spreadsheet NefasQS published alongside the video, studio funds were allegedly spent on personal expenses for Sharif and his husband John Moore. Those include $121,000 for a private chef, $48,000 for historical antiques, $21,000 for Magic: The Gathering cards, and additional payments to a luxury cigar retailer. NefasQS also lists $220,000 in DoorDash orders and $6,600 for Steam games among the claimed line items.
The most serious allegation involves a company called Gore Oil Company, which the ledger shows received $81,166 from Intrepid. Gore Oil was the deed owner of a San Diego mansion purchased by Sharif and Moore in April 2020 for $4.9 million. Beyond individual line items, NefasQS contends that without repeated cash injections from loans and outside investors, Intrepid would have gone bankrupt several times over.
Sharif denies any misuse of Ashes of Creation funds
Sharif disputed both the spreadsheet’s accuracy and NefasQS’s conclusions. In a statement to Kotaku, he said NefasQS had been “fed false and defamatory information by individuals with an axe to grind, in an effort to litigate this dispute in the public domain alongside our lawsuit already pending in federal court.” He accused NefasQS of repeating unverified claims to drive views, “with disregard for basic journalistic standards.”
He called any characterization of a “lavish lifestyle” or personal misuse of company funds “categorically false,” and said court proceedings had already revealed that the opposing parties “orchestrated an unlawful foreclosure to take control of Intrepid’s assets from the people who built Ashes of Creation, with the intent to exploit those assets for their own benefit.”
Shortly after the video went live, NefasQS reported attempts to have it removed. “Someone already filed a privacy complaint against this video, just a heads-up but we will be disputing it,” he wrote in the YouTube comments. His Reddit account was also reported to administrators around the same time.
Sharif had claimed a “first legal victory” against Intrepid’s board in the United States District Court of Southern California back in March, though the proceedings remain ongoing.