Intrepid Studios Ends Publishing Agreement With My.com Raising Skepticism About Ashes of Creation

Intrepid Studios, the company behind Skyforge, would be publishing the game in Europe. Intrepid Studios will now self-publish Ashes of Creation globally.

While this announcement has been greeted with much fanfare on Reddit, it raises some red flags. While My.com, like many other free to play MMO publishers, isn't particularly popular in the MMO community, the company's partnership with Intrepid Studios provided legitimacy to Ashes of Creation. It showed skeptics like myself that a real company (one owned by the multi billion dollar Mail.ru Group), believed in the project.

Despite the legitimate concerns with My.com and their 'p2w practices' with previous titles, they've launched and ed numerous MMOs, something Intrepid Studios has never done. Unless of course you count the disastrous launch of their Battle Royale game Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse, which proved to be such an embarrassment for the company that they quickly shut it down. And no, I never bought the explanation that Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse was never meant to be a commercial product and was just a testing ground for the PvP in MMORPG version of Ashes of Creation. This explanation never made sense, as Apocalypse launched with a cash shop and ed micro transactions, something that didn't make sense to include in a game built purely to test combat mechanics.

While I still hope the MMORPG version of Ashes of Creation does end up launching, I'm not too hopeful. The record behind these crowdfunded Camelot Unchained, etc). Will Ashes of Creation deliver? I hope so, but I'm not optimistic.