After being in development for over 10 years,Hytale, a sandbox game from the Hypixel Studios team with support from Riot, has officially been cancelled. Hypixel Studios’ CEO, Noxy, announced the cancellation on X on June 23, with the officialHytaleforumsfollowing suit.
As detailed in Noxy’s announcement post,Hytalebeing canned primarily stems from the growing standards within the overall gaming industry each year, making it much harder to compete in the space. Noxy describes this further, stating that “Over time, as our vision evolved and the genre matured around us, the bar kept rising. Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found thatHytalestill wasn’t as far along as it needed to be.”
A Difficult Update About HytaleHey Everyone,Today, I shared some incredibly tough news with the Hypixel Studios team: we’re ending development on Hytale and beginning the process of winding down Hypixel Studios over the next few months.This is not the outcome any of us – at…
Hytale’ssurge in popularity originated from Hypixel Studios’ history with itsMinecraftserver, Hypixel. With their knowledge and experience running one of the most successful and long-standing servers, the community naturally started callingHytalea potential “Minecraftkiller,” especially with how far Hypixel Studios was pushing the game’s quality and features beyond their usual limits while still keeping a familiar artstyle and gameplay loop that madeMinecraftas popular as it is.
AlthoughHytalewas originally announced in 2018, updates on its development were few and far between. While the team would occasionally share screenshots from the game, including its wildlife, environments, and structures, a series of engine reboots and timeline adjustments made it tricky to see much beyond small development updates, with no word of a potential Alpha or Beta period ever coming to pass.
As a long-time fan of Hypixel’sMinecraftservers for well over a decade now, I heard aboutHytaleshortly after its initial 2018 announcement trailer. Although I wasn’t particularly surprised by this news, it’s still unfortunate to see. Fortunately, Noxy clarifies later in the post that Hypixel’sMinecraftservers are unaffected by this cancellation, so we won’t have to worry about a complete server closure.
At the time of writing, there’s no word from Noxy or the Hypixel team on what will follow from this cancellation. Odds are, they’ll continue to build on their pre-existingMinecraftserver, but only time will tell how this unfolds from here onward.
