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.

Riot Games Acquires Hytale Developer Hypixel Studios

2020-04-16T21:42:57Z

Riot Games, developers of League of Legends, have finished the process of acquiring Hypixel Studios, developers of upcoming game Hytale and sister company of the developers of the Hypixel server in Minecraft.

https://twitter.com/riotgames/status/1250801408187731968

Riot Games was one of the main investors of Hypixel Studios when it was founded in 2018.

Riot Games' president Dylan Jadeja says that we aspire to support a passionate studio committed to delivering a groundbreaking, genre-defining experience for players.

Hypixel Studios founder Simon Collins-Laflamme says that This means a bigger budget for Hytale, more security for our team, and advisory support from a company that knows how to launch and operate successful, long-running games.

Aaron Donaghey, the COO of Hypixel Studios, will be replacing Collins-Laflamme as CEO, with Collins-Laflamme taking a step back [so to] be in a better position to advise the team whenever they need it.

https://twitter.com/Noxywoxy/status/1250813074673668096

This announcement has been a long time coming – Donaghey says that the reason the Hytale community did not receive as many progress updates about the game's development was because they were working out the logistics of what kind of future partnership worked best for the team.

Since this aquisition seems reminiscent of Microsoft's purchase of Mojang back in 2014, Donaghey reassures players that while we'll be expanding and improving our development pipeline, the core culture of Hypixel Studios won't change. Hypixel Studios will remain an independent studio, but with Riot Games as a parent company.

This aquisition will also help Hypixel Studios set up its first physical studio: the new headquarters of the company will be in (London-)Derry, Northern Ireland. To start, this HQ will contain support staff to help with the daily activities of the company and a quality assurance team to assist with the development of Hytale.