There are games that have bizarre and incredible stories. Stories of insane developments, impossible launches, or unexpected massive sales. Few can claim to be all of that and also say they survived being, literally, canceled. But that is what has happened with a game that has just been released in early access and promises to be talked about not only during 2026 but for years to come. Its name is Hytale, Riot Games wanted to kill it, and its developers have shown that it was a mistake to try.
The game that Riot Games canceled and has been a success
Hytale is a game that was born with the premise of becoming a new Minecraft. Literally. Starting its development in early 2015, the game is created by Aaron “Noxy” Donaghey from Hypixel Studios, a studio with more than forty employees, whose origin is the Hypixel server of Minecraft.
Although perhaps not known outside the Minecraft community, Hypixel Network, or Hypixel, is one of the most important servers of the game. Launching its beta on April 13, 2013, by Simon Collins-Laflamme and Philippe Touchett, its premise was simple: to offer adventure maps they created together. But that is not what made the server popular. To ensure that the waits between player connections were not tedious, they created minigames for already connected players to entertain themselves in the meantime. And they became so popular that Hypixel became a server specialized in minigames.
With four Guinness World Records, two of them for being the Minecraft or any independent game server with the most concurrent players (64,533 as of July 7, 2017), having the most games on a Minecraft server (43 as of August 11, 2017), and having the most registered users on a Minecraft server (11,982,298 players as of August 24, 2017), it is one of the largest, if not the largest Minecraft server in the world. And for this reason, it is logical that Hypixel wanted to create their own game.
Especially because they had a more than evident reason to want to have control over their servers. A change in the terms of use of Minecraft by the developing company, Mojang, meant that, in 2014, there could be no microtransactions that affected gameplay on the game’s servers. This caused an 85% drop in Hypixel’s revenue, leading the server to lose the vast majority of its profits. This made them decide to respond by creating their own version of the game less than a year later.
The development began with the funding of the Hypixel server, but in December 2018 they not only announced the existence of the game and revealed its name, Hytale, but also received significant support from one of the largest companies in the world: Riot Games. Investing several million dollars, they maintained a close relationship that led to Riot acquiring Hypixel Studios in April 2020 for an amount that has still not been disclosed.
By then, Hytale already had two and a half million pre-registered users. With over 30 million views of its trailer during its first month, this led to the game growing in scale. Although it was scheduled for a release in 2021, it was delayed several times, leading players to think that the game would never be released. This seemed to be confirmed when Donaghey announced the cancellation of Hytale and the closure of Hypixel Studios on June 23, 2025, after more than ten years of development, because he believed that the game was too ambitious to succeed.
A story of rebirth
Collins-Laflamme, the original founder of the studio, did not share the same opinion. After the project’s cancellation, he negotiated with Riot Games to take over the project and, on November 17, 2025, officially confirmed that he had acquired the intellectual property of Hytale. This way, he re-hired more than 30 developers from the original project, abandoned the engine they were developing for the game, and reverted to the previous engine.
Hytale has finally been released on January 13, 2026, although with some caveats. It is in early access and according to Collins-Laflamme himself, “it’s still not very good.” If you want to buy it, it’s not available in stores, only on its official page. And you have three possible editions: the standard, the supporter, and the cursebreaker, costing respectively €20.72, €36.27, and €72.55.
Although the official figures are expected to take a few more days to be released, we already know that the game has been a success. Not only because it has taken social media and streaming services by storm as a true Minecraft killer, offering an adventure game that iterates and improves everything that made Mojang’s game great, but also because Collins-Laflame has confirmed this. Stating that, just with what they have sold so far, they can already cover the development of at least the next two years of the game.
That’s why, although we still need to see how it will evolve over time, it seems that we will have Hytale for a long time. And it seems that, for the first time in history since its launch, Minecraft has found a competitor of its caliber.
