In 2022, Riot Games Considered a $250–$500 Million Deal to Acquire the Creators of Ashes of Creation

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In 2022, Riot Games wanted to acquire the creators of Ashes of Creation the deal could have amounted to $500 million, according to reporting tied to court exhibits filed in 2026 and later public confirmation from Riot co founder Marc Merrill that Riot had explored making an investment in, or even acquiring, Intrepid Studios a few years earlier. The story matters because it sits at the intersection of two big MMO narratives: Ashes of Creation’s long, expensive development cycle and Riot’s own struggle to define what a future League of Legends MMO should look like.

What can be said with confidence is narrower than the loudest social media versions of the rumor. Publicly available reporting indicates that a December 20, 2022 email from Riot CFO Mark Sottosanti discussed a potential acquisition of Intrepid and contemplated a total Riot investment of roughly $250 million to $500 million. Riot later acknowledged that discussions happened, but the exact structure, valuation mechanics, and any final terms remain partly redacted or unpublicized.

Yelzkizi in 2022, riot games considered a $250–$500 million deal to acquire the creators of ashes of creation

Riot Games Ashes of Creation acquisition offer 2022

The core claim is no longer just a rumor. On April 15, 2026, Marc Merrill publicly said that Riot had “looked at making an investment or even acquiring Intrepid a few years ago,” but that Riot ultimately decided not to move forward with the discussions. That statement is important because it independently confirms the existence of talks that had been circulating through lawsuit-related reporting.

The 2022 date also lines up with reporting on a court-filed exhibit that described a December 20, 2022 email from Riot CFO Mark Sottosanti. Multiple outlets, citing the filing, described the communication as part of an attempt to explore a possible acquisition of Intrepid Studios, the developer behind Ashes of Creation. Taken together, Merrill’s statement and the reported exhibit make it reasonable to treat the acquisition approach as real, even though the public still does not have the full unredacted transaction record.

Intrepid Studios buyout rumors from Riot Games explained

The buyout rumors exploded because they surfaced inside a much larger legal dispute over ownership, control, financing, and intellectual property around Intrepid Studios. In other words, the Riot angle did not emerge from ordinary corporate deal reporting; it appeared through litigation, declarations, and exhibits tied to a federal case involving Steven Sharif and several defendants connected to Intrepid’s corporate governance fight.

That context matters because litigation records can reveal real documents while still presenting them through one side’s narrative. The safest interpretation is that the existence of discussions has now been corroborated by Riot itself, but motives, tone, and the consequences of rejecting the offer are often described through allegations in the lawsuit or through statements from people aligned with one side of the dispute. Readers should separate the confirmed fact of talks from the more contested claims about why everything broke down afterward.

$250 million to $500 million Riot Games offer details

The number most often repeated is not a clean final sale price. Reporting based on the exhibit described “a total Riot investment of approximately $250 – $500 million” for a “potential acquisition” of Intrepid. That phrasing is important because it suggests a contemplated range or package rather than a simple headline purchase price signed by both sides.

That is why some retellings say Riot considered a $250 million deal, while others say the deal could have been worth as much as $500 million. Both versions appear to be drawing from the same broad reported wording. The most accurate summary is that Riot reportedly explored an acquisition scenario in which the total investment under discussion was somewhere in the $250 million to $500 million range. Anything more precise than that would go beyond what the public record clearly supports.

The same reported exhibit also said Riot and Intrepid shared a goal of building and evolving a genre-defining MMO for the long term, which helps explain why Riot would even look externally at a still-unreleased project while also trying to build its own MMO internally.

Mark Sottosanti Riot CFO email to Intrepid Studios

Mark Sottosanti was Riot’s chief financial officer, a role Riot publicly announced in August 2021 after he joined from Activision Blizzard, and Riot’s leadership page has also listed him as CFO. That makes the reported December 2022 outreach especially significant: this was not framed as casual business development chatter, but as contact from a top finance executive at Riot.

According to reporting on the filing exhibit, the email was sent on December 20, 2022 and was addressed to Steven Sharif and John Moore. The message reportedly outlined Riot’s interest in a potential acquisition of Intrepid and referenced a contemplated total investment range of $250 million to $500 million. Because the exhibit itself is not fully and cleanly published in unredacted form across primary public channels, the exact wording should be treated as reported-from-filing rather than independently reproduced from a complete public source.

Steven Sharif statement on the Riot Games acquisition talks

Steven Sharif publicly addressed the wider controversy in April 2026 through an “April Public Statement and Update Regarding Intrepid Studios.” Reporting on that statement says Sharif argued that the public conversation had been overwhelmed by a coordinated defamation campaign from opposing parties in his lawsuit, and he also insisted that he would not allow the work of Intrepid’s developers and the expectations of Ashes of Creation’s community to be erased.

Sharif’s public posture therefore combined two ideas: first, that the legal and public-relations battle was distorting the company’s story; and second, that Ashes of Creation still mattered enough to defend aggressively. Even where the precise details of the Riot conversations came from legal exhibits rather than Sharif’s own long-form retelling, his public statements made clear that he viewed the surrounding narrative as part of a larger fight over Intrepid’s future and reputation.

Why Intrepid Studios rejected the Riot Games offer

No fully public, signed explanation from Intrepid lays out a board-level rationale in detail, so any answer here has to remain measured. The simplest explanation is control. Ashes of Creation was presented for years as Steven Sharif’s ambitious, founder-driven MMO vision, with Sharif repeatedly described as the project’s driving force and a major source of early funding. Selling the studio in 2022 would have meant giving up a large degree of independence over the game, the company, or both.

There is also reporting tied to a declaration from former investor Tom Alkazin claiming that after Intrepid declined Riot’s offer, the tone from Robert Dawson and Nick Caramanis changed sharply and became coercive. That allegation is notable, but it remains an allegation from litigation-linked reporting rather than an adjudicated fact. What it does suggest is that the rejected Riot path became part of a much broader power struggle over financing and control inside the company.

Robert Dawson investor role in the Ashes of Creation deal

Court reporting describes Robert Dawson as a central figure in Intrepid’s financing story. Public summaries of Sharif’s claims say Dawson was able to gain increasing equity and control through financing leverage, allegedly threatening to withhold funding close to payroll deadlines. Those same summaries describe Dawson as eventually becoming the majority shareholder and the primary provider of crucial debt financing.

The court materials also describe a major securitization event in May 2024, when Dawson allegedly secured debt against all of Intrepid’s assets and intellectual property. If accurate, that helps explain why the Riot acquisition discussions matter beyond headline value: a deal of that size could have dramatically changed the company’s ownership structure, liquidity position, and future bargaining power among existing stakeholders.

Secondary reporting has also said Dawson invested as much as $80 million into the project. That figure is widely repeated, but because it appears in media coverage rather than a single clean official financing statement, it is best treated as reported context rather than a fully verified cap-table fact.

Ashes of Creation court documents and lawsuit filings breakdown

The litigation most often cited in connection with the Riot story is Sharif v. Dawson et al., filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Public court access points and legal-reporting pages show the case exists and connect it to disputes involving Steven Sharif, Robert Dawson, Ryan Ogden, Theresa Fette, Aaron Bartels, TFE Games Holdings LLC, and nominal defendant Intrepid Studios.

A March 4, 2026 order granting a temporary restraining order is especially important because it provides a court-authenticated summary of the dispute’s background. That order says Sharif served on Intrepid’s board from the company’s inception in 2015 until his resignation in January 2026, and it describes Intrepid as having valuable intellectual property, trade secrets, and debt financing arrangements that became central to the conflict.

Additional reporting on the case says the court found the balance of hardships tipped sharply toward Sharif when considering temporary relief, partly because TFE was allegedly positioned to access and potentially sell trade secrets associated with Ashes of Creation. There is also a related Nevada matter involving TFE Games Holdings and Sharif, which shows the dispute was not confined to one court or one narrow procedural issue.

For the Riot angle specifically, the lawsuit matters because it is the vehicle through which the reported Sottosanti email and other acquisition-related materials surfaced in public. Without the court fight, the 2022 talks might never have become broadly known.

Riot Games League of Legends MMO development problems and timelines

Riot publicly announced in February 2021 that it was making an MMO set in the League of Legends universe. That alone explains why any external MMO acquisition rumor around Riot attracts so much attention: Riot was openly hiring and building toward a genre-defining online world under the Runeterra brand.

But Riot’s internal MMO path has been difficult. In March 2024, Marc Merrill said the project had been reset because the initial vision was not different enough from what players had already experienced, describing it as too close to “an MMO that you’ve played before with a Runeterra coat of paint.” He also suggested Riot would go dark for several years while rethinking the project.

That reset did not mean the project was dead. In February 2025, Merrill said “Oh yeah” when asked whether the MMO still existed and added that it was probably the Riot project he personally spent the most time on. The important takeaway is that Riot’s MMO ambition continued, but its internal timeline and creative direction were unstable enough to make outside investment or acquisition conversations look strategically plausible.

Riot Games MMO strategy: acquisition vs building in-house

Riot’s public behavior suggests the company was at least willing to evaluate both tracks. On one track, it was staffing and developing its own League-based MMO in-house. On the other, Marc Merrill later admitted Riot had at one point looked at investing in or acquiring Intrepid. That does not prove Riot had abandoned its internal project in 2022, but it does show the company was open to multiple ways of securing a major MMO future.

This makes business sense. Building a new MMO from scratch is slow, expensive, and risky. Acquiring a studio already deep in production can accelerate talent acquisition, technology access, and live-world expertise. At the same time, acquisition creates brand-integration, cultural, and control risks that do not exist in the same way when a publisher builds internally. Riot’s eventual choice not to move forward with Intrepid suggests that, whatever promise Ashes of Creation represented, the fit was not strong enough to beat the complications.

Would Riot have rebranded Ashes of Creation into a Runeterra MMO

There is no public evidence that Riot had a finalized plan to rebrand Ashes of Creation into a Runeterra MMO. That idea is a popular fan theory because Riot already had League of Legends lore, factions, and worldbuilding, and because Ashes of Creation was an ambitious fantasy MMORPG in development. But theory is not proof.

In fact, Marc Merrill’s 2024 explanation for resetting Riot’s internal MMO pushes in the opposite direction. He said Riot did not want to make a generic MMO with only a Runeterra skin on top. If Riot felt that strongly about creative differentiation, then a simple “buy Ashes and repaint it as League” scenario looks less likely than many headlines imply. A more defensible interpretation is that Riot may have been interested in Intrepid’s team, technology, or production momentum, not necessarily in performing a superficial lore swap.

Ashes of Creation Kickstarter funding and studio financing context

Ashes of Creation began as a crowdfunded project but was never purely Kickstarter-funded. The game’s 2017 Kickstarter raised $3,271,809 from 19,576 backers, which was a strong signal of demand but far below the total amount normally required to build a modern, large-scale MMORPG.

Sharif said in 2017 that the project was being funded by him and that a core viable build would cost around $30 million, with crowdfunding meant to expand scope rather than serve as the only financial foundation. By 2018, reporting said the vast majority of the project was still being personally funded by Sharif, even as Intrepid expanded office space and team size.

This financing context is essential to understanding why a $250 million to $500 million acquisition conversation would have been so meaningful. For a crowdfunded-yet-founder-backed MMO, that kind of deal could have resolved capital pressure, changed governance, and transformed development certainty almost overnight.

Ashes of Creation development timeline from Kickstarter to 2022

Ashes of Creation’s public journey started with the 2017 Kickstarter campaign, which established the game as an ambitious sandbox MMORPG with node-based world evolution, player-driven politics, and large-scale PvP and PvE systems. In the years that followed, Intrepid kept building out the project, expanding staff and infrastructure while periodically showing pre-alpha and alpha materials to the community.

By 2022, the game was still unreleased, but it had already become one of the most visible crowdfunded MMORPGs in development. That is precisely what made Intrepid attractive in theory: Riot would not have been buying a finished live service, but it would have been looking at a studio with an established community, a recognizable brand within MMO circles, and years of work already sunk into the product.

The later Alpha Two schedule helps show just how long the runway became. Intrepid’s official Alpha Two FAQ says Phase I began on October 25, 2024, Phase II on December 20, 2024, and Phase III on May 1, 2025, underscoring that the game’s road from 2017 crowdfunding to playable large-scale testing stretched far beyond the period when Riot reportedly approached the studio.

Is Ashes of Creation cancelled, dead, or still in development

This is the hardest question to answer cleanly because the public signals conflict. On one side, Game Developer reported in early 2026 that Intrepid Studios was closing permanently and that 123 workers would lose their jobs, based on a WARN notice. Other outlets also reported resignations and major upheaval.

On the other side, official Ashes of Creation channels remained active after that. Intrepid’s official Alpha Two pages announced that Phase III testing had begun, the support site published a January 20, 2026 article about connecting to the Alpha Two PTR on Steam, and the Steam page still described the game as being in active alpha testing with Beta One and Beta Two to follow.

The most accurate answer, then, is that Ashes of Creation is not straightforwardly “dead” in the sense of vanishing from all official channels, but its development and commercial future became deeply uncertain after the 2026 studio crisis. Anyone claiming the game is definitely alive and healthy, or definitely canceled beyond doubt, is simplifying a situation that remains messy in the public record.

How to verify the Riot Games Intrepid Studios acquisition claim

The best way to verify the claim is to triangulate across three source types. First, check public court-access sources and reporting tied to the federal case involving Steven Sharif and Robert Dawson, because that is where the acquisition-related exhibit reporting emerged. Second, check Marc Merrill’s April 2026 public statement acknowledging that Riot had explored investing in or acquiring Intrepid a few years earlier. Third, verify the identities and roles involved, such as Mark Sottosanti’s position as Riot CFO, through Riot’s own announcements and leadership materials.

A strong verification standard also means resisting overstatement. The public evidence supports that talks happened and that a $250 million to $500 million investment range was contemplated in a potential acquisition scenario. The public evidence does not support claiming that a final binding acquisition agreement was reached, that Riot definitely intended to turn Ashes into a League MMO, or that every allegation surrounding the post-offer fallout has been proven in court.

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FAQ questions and answers

1. Did Riot Games really try to buy Intrepid Studios in 2022?
Riot later confirmed that it had looked at making an investment in, or even acquiring, Intrepid a few years earlier, so the existence of discussions is confirmed.

2. Was the offer $250 million or $500 million?
Public reporting tied to the filing described a contemplated total Riot investment of approximately $250 million to $500 million, so the safest answer is that the publicly reported range was $250 million to $500 million rather than one finalized number.

3. Who reportedly sent the email to Intrepid?
Reporting on the court exhibit says the email came from Riot CFO Mark Sottosanti on December 20, 2022. Riot’s own materials confirm he was the company’s CFO.

4. Did Riot confirm the exact dollar amount publicly?
No public Riot statement appears to confirm the exact number in detail. Riot confirmed the talks, but the dollar range came through reporting on litigation exhibits.

5. Why would Riot want Intrepid if it was already making a League MMO?
Because large MMOs are difficult to build, and Riot’s internal MMO later hit a reset. Exploring acquisition while also building in-house fits a company trying to keep multiple strategic paths open.

6. Why did Intrepid reject the offer?
There is no fully public definitive board explanation, but independence, founder control, and differing views on the company’s future are the most plausible reasons based on public reporting and financing context.

7. Did Riot plan to turn Ashes of Creation into a Runeterra MMO?
There is no public proof of that. It remains speculation, and Marc Merrill’s later comments about not wanting a simple Runeterra-skinned MMO actually caution against that assumption.

8. What role did Robert Dawson play?
Public court reporting describes Dawson as a major financier who allegedly became the majority shareholder and key provider of debt financing, making him central to the power struggle around Intrepid.

9. Is Ashes of Creation still being made?
The public picture is mixed. Reporting in 2026 said Intrepid was closing permanently, but official Ashes channels continued posting Alpha Two and PTR-related material, so the game’s status is best described as uncertain rather than clearly resolved.

10. What is the most reliable way to check the claim yourself?
Use public court records and court-reporting summaries, then compare them with Marc Merrill’s public acknowledgment and Riot’s official materials about Mark Sottosanti’s role. That combination gives the strongest independent cross-check.

conclusion

The clearest conclusion is that the Riot Games and Intrepid Studios acquisition story was real at the level that matters most: Riot has acknowledged that it explored investing in or acquiring Intrepid, and litigation-linked reporting describes a 2022 email from Riot CFO Mark Sottosanti discussing a potential acquisition with a total investment range of roughly $250 million to $500 million.

Where readers should be careful is in everything beyond that core. The public record does not show a completed deal, does not prove a Runeterra rebrand plan, and does not settle every allegation about why the talks failed or how Intrepid’s internal power struggle evolved afterward. What it does show is a remarkable moment when one of gaming’s biggest publishers seriously examined buying one of the most talked-about crowdfunded MMOs in development, while both companies were wrestling with the enormous difficulty of building the next great online world.