Every time I think I am free of Ashes of Creation, I get pulled back in. Happy birthday to me, I guess, because Karthos, a long-time community member, redeemed 50,000 Paradox Points and requested this viewer’s choice segment:
“I’d like to see you make a video on Ashes of Creation doing marketing for their upcoming Alpha.”
To do that, we need to take a quick look at the most recent livestream.
“This is also something that we get to use to litmus test some of these systems, not within the, you know, I don't want to call it necessarily, um, not within the core golden cohort, right? You guys who are on this stream right now, the 2,500 people who are watching the, you know, 50, 60, 70,000 people who will watch this, uh, Twitch recording and, or live stream on YouTube. You're a very core audience. You are very invested. You like this game, you are sold on kind of what we're trying to achieve. Otherwise you wouldn't be here right now.”
The Numbers Don’t Add Up
On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, Intrepid’s community engagement has been trending downward. According to TwitchTracker, the last time they broke 5,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch was December 20, 2024. Their YouTube recap views haven’t hit 50,000 since before that December update. Most livestream recaps since then have been in the low 40,000s, peaking at 43,000 in July 2025.
The more worrying number is participation. Two live servers exist today: Lotharia and Shol. Steven has previously said one server capped at 8,100 players, meaning a total of 16,200 possible testers. Against the 130,000 claimed Alpha 2 testers, that’s less than 12.5% of the base engaged at any one time.
Marketing or Advertising?
Steven framed the livestream discussion around “marketing,” but Margaret immediately followed up with talk about an advertising buy. Those are not the same thing. Marketing is strategy, messaging, and positioning. Advertising is paid placement.
If Intrepid’s solution is to buy testers, that’s questionable at best. You spent nine years cultivating an audience that now largely skips your livestreams and recaps. Instead of addressing retention, the plan is to spend money to acquire more testers?
If the goal truly is “fresh perspectives,” there’s a cheaper option: give away Alpha keys. That gets you new voices without burning money on ads.
The Community Pulse
Look at the Reddit feedback. The thread discussing advertising Alpha 2 pulled 92 comments and 37 upvotes. Intrepid’s own post of their livestream managed just 13 upvotes and 6 comments. That is a picture of community fatigue.
Intrepid has also insisted for years that they haven’t “done marketing” or, when pressed, that they haven’t done paid marketing. Any pushback gets waved off as “semantics.” Words only seem to matter when they serve the narrative of the moment.
The Jahlon Bottom Line
You don’t have a product yet, so any advertising is wasted dollars. With your abysmal retention rate of players who already paid $100 to $500 for test packages, you’re not holding onto the audience you built. You’ve always said “it will be ready when it’s ready.” In the meantime, you already have email lists, forums, a content creator program, monthly livestreams, daily tweets, and a subreddit. You have more than enough channels to reach your community, yet most of them go underutilized.
My opinion is that this push smells like money problems. Advertising only makes sense when you can spend $1 and pull back $3 to $5. That’s not where you’re at. If you go forward with this plan, it’s going to bite Intrepid right on the buttcheek. Sure, you might see a short spike in players, but with a 90-day refund policy, you’ll get hammered with chargebacks. After that, the noise won’t be from your livestreams, it’ll be from every creator with a camera and microphone making content about how bad the product really is.