Hytale, the contender for Minecraft’s throne, rises from the ashes in a historic move
After being canceled in June, the Hypixel project returns to its creator, who buys back Hytale from Riot and commits to personally financing it for a decade.
“We did it. Hytale is saved. We have acquired Hytale from Riot Games,” Collins-Laflamme wrote on X, confirming that the rights to the game are returning to its original creators in what is one of the most spectacular and talked-about resurrections in recent times. At the same time, the official Hytale blog published a strong message: the team has repurchased the project, rehired more than 30 developers, and committed to independently funding the game for at least the next ten years.
For years, Hytale was the big “what if” of the sandbox scene: a project born out of the Hypixel community that promised to take the Minecraft formula and take it one step further. Its 2018 announcement trailer surpassed 30 million views and made the game a serious contender for the genre’s throne, with a devoted community long before there was an actual release date.
That dream seemed to end on June 23, 2025, when Riot Games, owner of Hypixel Studios since 2020, announced the closure of the studio and the cancellation of Hyrule. The company openly admitted that the project had become too complex, with engine changes and technical ambitions that prevented it from seeing a clear path to launch.
A few weeks later, Simon Collins-Laflamme, co-founder of Hypixel and one of the visible faces of the original project, publicly stated that he was willing to invest up to $25 million of his own money to buy Hytale back from Riot and finish it with a more realistic approach.
A new beginning, looking back to the origins
In the same statement, those responsible emphasize something unusual: “Transactions like this are rare in the video game industry.” It is not just a matter of a canceled project being revived, but of doing so through the total repurchase of intellectual property and without resorting to external investors or traditional publishers. Hytale will be financed, according to its creators, with their own money and a strategy that is deliberately restrained in terms of team size and technological ambition.
The plan is to return to the “legacy” engine that Hytale used in its early versions, abandon the attempt to build a large multi-platform framework, and focus, from day one, on having a playable game on PC. The official roadmap mentions early access on Windows, with Linux and Mac “to be attempted later,” while consoles and mobile devices are relegated to the long term.
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This early access will be presented without embellishment: the team itself warns that there will be bugs, unbalanced systems, and raw content, with the idea of iterating quickly alongside the community. The immediate priority will be to polish the living world, the sandbox, and the modding tools, leaving the minigames and Adventure mode that were part of the original vision for the project for later.
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