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.
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.
One month and over 30 million views later, Hypixel Studios faced 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.
But this is where the story starts to turn.
Missteps
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.
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.
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.
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.
Studio Devolver Digital have even entered the foray, responding with a mysterious tweet only containing 👀
.
Only time will tell if Hytale is brought back from the dead – or if fans are desperately just chugging hopium.