Tag: HYTALE – Nixinova News

Hytale Brought Back From the Dead: Game Repurchased and Revived, Gameplay Shown

2025-11-19T04:20:00Z

After weeks of hints by founder Simon Collins-Laflamme, the long-awaited Hytale, cancelled in June, has been brought back from the dead, with a gameplay video released to boot.

Hytale was first announced in December 2018, and blew up immediately, its trailer boasting a million views per day in its first month. Its unexpected popularity lead to a steep increase in the game's scope over the next couple of years.

Collins-Laflamme, who sold the game along with the entirety of its developer Hypixel Studios to Riot Games in 2020, announced on Monday he has re-purchased the game, which is now being developed by a team of 30 re-hired developers.

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1990479578239049974

With fresh vigour after 7 long years of development hell, Hytale will see a public alpha sooner rather than later. This early access phase will last at least a few years.

He tempers player expectations – It's messy. It's janky. And there's a lot of work to be done. However, he states that his priority is to just get the game out to players, no matter what.

The assets purchased are the original version of the game, before the engine was rewritten from scratch.

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1990801397995180156

To help "break the curse", he has released today gameplay footage of Hytale, raw and uncut. Recorded and edited this morning by me, just raw, random footage. I mean, I even forgot to mute my mic so you can hear me click he says.

https://x.com/Hytale/status/1990929216574271498

He goes on to make a very long list of what is wrong with the gameplay in the video – not that fans care about its minor bugs and irregularities.

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1990964188450066817

Additionally, he announces that Hytale will be taking zero money from modders and server owners for two years from release, so that they can help bring us players.

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1990861531920154843

Collins-Laflamme will be assuredly releasing further sneak peeks and teasers for Hytale in the coming weeks, before an announcement will be made on its early access date.

Hytale Cancelled: What Happened? – A Timeline of its Descent Into Chaos & Is There Hope For Revival

2025-06-27T06:14:00Z

Hypixel Studios shook the gaming world to its core this past week when they announced that their long-awaited debut title Hytale – a game in development for a decade, with over 60 million hopeful people having watched its announcement trailer – had met its end.

The entirety of Hytale, thrown into the trash, along with the entire studio, leaving its 150-odd employees stranded.

https://x.com/Noxywoxy/status/1937180229031940439

What on Earth happened, and where will the game go from here – could it be saved in the eleventh hour and rise back from the dead?

History

Let's start at the beginning –

Hytale is was an open-world sandbox RPG that started development all the way back in 2015, after a team of developers from the most popular Minecraft multiplayer server, Hypixel, set out to create their own sandbox, dissatisfied with EULA changes that developer Mojang had announced shortly before its acquisition by Microsoft.

Come December 2018, the studio took the gaming community by storm after it dropped the announcement trailer for Hytale. No-one, and especially not the developers of Hytale could have foreseen how immediately popular the game would be.

A month passes and the trailer completely blows up, gaining 30 million views. Come 2019, Hypixel Studios faces an internal reckoning – having an order of magnitude more players than they expected to have, they raised the game's scope to try match the expectations of the large possible player base they were amassing.

This was no big deal – the assumed 2019 beta release date was pushed back a couple years as the team grappled with creating the game that players expected. A release by 2021 was almost guaranteed.

The instant explosion drew eyes of larger gaming companies. Riot Games, who had given funding for the game, purchased Hypixel Studios in its entirety in April of 2020.

Riot Games was the perfect parent company, basically providing a blank cheque to the studio and everything they could ever need. Former developers praise dealing with Riot, describing the parent company as absolutely great to work with.

But this is where the story starts to turn.

Missteps

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1937845322039873916

With the boost in status having been purchased by a gaming giant, the studio began to restructure. CEO Aaron Donaghey began a hiring spree, and hired "real" producers with "real game" experience from the game industry and let them drive the project into something else with bigger plans, according to the studio's founder Simon Collins-Laflamme.

They fatefully then began to rewrite ton of features, systems and even the engine – the latter being a killer.

Come 2021, the game's scope blew out massive – now they wanted a cross-platform release. In order to accomplish this, they needed to start writing the game's engine from scratch. A several year delay was instantiated.

The game's engine, what powers it in its entirely, is the most critical part of game development. Everything in a game is built specifically for its engine. Rewriting a game engine from scratch is the most risky move a company can make when they are already multiple years in development.

The Hytale of 2020 was almost ready to release. Yet, this engine rewrite ended up causing the studio to have a less feature complete game in 2025 than they had at the start of 2020.

Former developer Kevin Carstens paints a frustratingly grim picture of what happened at this period in time: Systems that were already far ahead of Minecraft at the time were completely re-invented to make them "even better" resulting [in] fuck all. With this knowledge, it is no surprise what happens next:

The game is killed

The 24th of June 2025, a new blog post is posted about a painful decision having been made. The game, its 10 years of passionate development, and all its employees are no more.

Donaghey states the reason being not being able to bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise after the game's technical ambitions grew more complex.

Riot Games pulled the plug. A five year time sink, tens millions of dollars spent, a complete rewrite of the game, only for it to be worse off than at the start of the acquisition – there was no way Hytale was surviving.

Frustrated developers wasted no time coming to X/Twitter to vent, and discontent spilled over into former developers publicly beefing with upper management.

https://x.com/NinjaCharlieT/status/1938168795513950329

Former artist Athina wrote about her experiences being sidelined by the studio whenever she shared ideas or concerns, describing working there as [deeply] draining and toxic.

Carstens says working at Hypixel Studios absolutely ruined my health. He elaborated by saying that working on managed decline of a project he was so passionate about made him dread getting out of bed every day.

After director John Hendricks stated that the game was not killed due to feature creep, former developers chimed in to call that claim laughable: Hearing "it wasn't feature creep"... Honestly I can only smash my face in the table if anyone believes that, states Carstens.

https://x.com/slikey_dev/status/1937827972754395169

Is there any hope?

Immediately after the cancellation announcement, fans started bargaining. The #SaveHytale hashtag was started, begging Riot Games to give the players any part of the game, whether it be an old unfinished build or modding tools that were built for the game, or to shunt development onto a new studio to build the game back up.

Usually these sorts of endeavours come to no avail, yet this time a glimmer of hope has been formed.

Collins-Laflamme is ready to invest $25 million into finishing the game with a new team, laying out a discrete plan: Reduce scope: legacy engine, [PC] only first, open source some parts, [a] small team, [and] cut unfinished features to accelerate towards beta.

https://x.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1938326713433268576

Studio Devolver Digital have even entered the foray, responding with a mysterious tweet only containing 👀.

https://x.com/devolverdigital/status/1938353908407058476

Only time will tell if Hytale is brought back from the dead – or if fans are desperately just chugging hopium.

Hytale Delayed By Several Years

2021-07-02T04:56:00Z

Hypixel Studios' much-anticipated upcoming game Hytale has a new release window – and it's not soon.

In a new development update, the first this year, the team explain what they've been working on in silence over the past half year.

The blog post starts off with the important news – Hytale will not be ready until 2023 at the earliest, and it could very well take longer.

The original release date for Hytale, announced in 2019, was 2021, which the team subtly rescinded last December. Even before that the team had anticipated a 2019 release, but stretched this out after the game's announcement trailer received over 50 million views.

Hypixel Studios offer several reasons for this long delay. The first is that the scope of what we can do has expanded – the studio wants to do more with their game.

The second is that Hypixel Studios want the game to release on desktop, console and mobile simultaneously – previously it was only in development for PC, though a mobile and console release was planned for after release on PC.

The studio want the game released on all platforms simultaneously as the community would ultimately find itself split across versions and devices if they didn't, like what has happened to the two main Minecraft editions.

This expanse in scope means making major changes to Hytale's engine to run on more playforms, necessitating this delay.

In the post the team also say they will now stop releasing weekly screenshots onto the game's Twitter account, because the major technical changes [...] will mean that, for a time, it will be more complicated to produce screenshots and clips that accurately reflect the experience that players will have.

Hypixel Studios end the blog post with details about new features. These include combat being revamped with new metrics and effects, advancements to creature AI to have enemies make smarter decisions, and a new piece from the game's soundtrack.

Is Hytale Still Releasing in 2021?

2020-12-22T21:23:09Z

Two years ago, the release date of the open beta for Hytale was set by developer Hypixel Studios to be 2021; however, this date has recently come under question. Will Hytale still be releasing next year?

The 2021 release date was given in a November 2019 blog post on the official Hytale website. In the post, Hypixel Studios said they were planning for Hytale to be playable by everyone in 2021.

So that was it, two years ago. The open beta would begin in 2021, with the option of a closed beta sometime in 2020. The latter case has not happened, of course, but the former was still expected to be true. No-one had any reason to doubt this 2021 release date, until a recent blog post by the team.

In this December 2020 blog post, Hypixel Studios are quite vague on the specifics surrounding the release of their game.

The post describes holdups that have occurred during development this year. Like everyone else in the world, the team has been disrupted by COVID-19, and the team says they have not been able to operate at 100% capacity in 2020.

The result of this is that Hypixel Studios was not able to cap off 2020 with the set of reveals they promised in the middle of the year, giving the reason that these features simply aren't ready to make their debut.

The team also spoke of major restructing of the game's mechanics, which may have put pressure on the 2021 release window. Hypixel Studios said Almost every part of the game, including many aspects of gameplay that have already been revealed, has been taken back to the drawing board, rethought, and in some cases overhauled.

This complete overhauling is obviously a major time hog, and as such, the studio says they don't currently have a launch plan for Hytale.

This statement, despite being prefixed with to be clear and the studio saying that they will be as specific as we possibly can be, is anything but.

There have been many interpretations of "launch plan" in the Hytale community. Have they rescinded the 2021 release date? Are they sticking with that window but don't currently have a specific timeframe in mind? Or maybe they just don't know the pricing model upon release?

Let's go with a clear definition of "launch plan": planning in sequence the schedule of events that lead up to, during, and past a product's launch date.

Under this definition, what Hypixel Studios is lacking is an exact plan of action on the technicalities of how the game will be released, not necessarily when.

They may have a date or window in mind (2021), but other than that they have no specific plans on, for instance, how to distribute game keys, whether or not the game will have its own launcher, what parts should be hidden from the public version of the game, how usernames should be dealt with, and so on.

Hypixel Studios promise to be crystal clear with their fans, which would imply they wouldn't rescind the 2021 release window or give a different one without being completely transparent about it. There is no indication of the game's release window being delayed, so the 2021 window given two years ago should be assumed to still be in place until the studio say otherwise.

The Complete History of Hytale

2020-12-08T06:56:32Z

Hytale is an upcoming video game by Hypixel Studios that combines the scope of a sandbox with the depth of a roleplaying game, according to its about page. Officially announced two years ago, Hytale has been in development by Hypixel Studios since around 2015. The game will be releasing within a year now, so here's a complete history of the development of Hytale.

Let's start at the beginning. The very beginning. A little game called Minecraft was first released publicly on a small gaming forum known as TIGSource in May 2009. You can still read through the original thread here. Two and a half years later, after several phases of development, Minecraft was fully released by Mojang on 18 November 2011.

A big part of Minecraft was its multiplayer, which has been in the game since almost the beginning. As Minecraft increased in popularity, servers with many players began to pop up. Eventually mods and plugins for the game came into existence, allowing for the creation of large, multi-network servers.

In the meantime, two players started creating adventure maps, uploading them to YouTube to showcase. As these maps became more popular, Simon Collins-Laflamme and Philippe Touchette eventually started a multiplayer server for players to enjoy their creations.

This server, Hypixel, was released to the public on 13 April 2013. At that point the server had been in development for around seven months, as evidenced by a job notice posted in September 2012.

Although the main purpose of the server at the start was to Play Hypixel adventure maps with your friends, the server included a couple of minigame maps as well; these quickly became more popular than the adventure maps, becoming the main focus of the server.

Hypixel had visions of creating its own game very early on. From December 2013, the server offered Early access testing to our future video game to its top patrons for a short while. After Mojang changed the EULA of Minecraft to prevent pay-to-win aspects of multiplayer servers in June 2014, Hypixel furthered their plans to create an independent game.

On the EULA changes, now-CEO of Hypixel Studios Aaron Donaghey said it was definitely a huge reminder for us that [...] you still exist within someone else's playing field. Hypixel developers wanted a game where they were in complete control of all features.

Full development of what is now Hytale began around April 2015, according to a forum post by Donaghey in December 2016. This post gave the first drops of information about Hytale, publishing the game's initial budget (US$3.6M) and listing its developers. From there, the game was developed quietly over the following two years.

On 10 December 2018, a three-day countdown was started at Hytale.com. On 13 December, the official trailer for Hytale dropped, and it's safe to say it went viral, garnering over 30 million views within a month, and currently sits on over 57 million views.

Since then, the official Hytale blog has been rife with content updates explaining various aspects of the game, and the game's Twitter account has been actively posting game screenshots.

Hypixel Studios say that Hytale will be playable by everyone in 2021. This means that upon release in beta, the game will have been in development for around six years, and everyone's expectations are quite high for this game.

Development won't stop in 2021, however: Hypixel Studios say that For years to come, we plan on supporting the game with new features, content updates and more.

So that's it: the full history of Hytale's development. Fans have been waiting for two years now, and the release of Hytale is almsot here. Expect Hypixel Studios to announce a specific release date in the coming months as development of the game nears completion.