Hytale Goes Live in Early Access After Riot Killed It, Bought Back by Its Founders and Expected to Hit a Million Players on Day One

The most improbable comeback in games this month started loading at 7 a.m. PST on Tuesday (Jan. 13). Hytale, the blocky sandbox RPG that Riot Games canceled in June 2025, entered early access, and the studio that rescued it said it expected more than a million players on day one.

Per Notebookcheck, the game went live on PC, Mac and Linux, and the demand seemed to confirm the founder’s forecast. Hypixel Studios co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme had asked players the day before to download the launcher and log in early to ease the strain:

On launch day the studio’s blog post put it more bluntly, as Notebookcheck quotes it:

The demand has exceeded our expectations, which means launch week will be bumpy, but everyone will get in.

Hypixel Studios, Notebookcheck, quoting Hypixel Studios

Early reports were mild: players on forums and Reddit described short login queues, and one player told the outlet, “I guess we just gotta wait for the servers to calm down.” The developers say patches for bugs and crashes are already in the works.

What it is

Hytale blends sandbox building with RPG and MMO structure. Insider Gaming describes a procedurally generated world to explore, full of dungeons, secrets and creatures, plus responsive combat and creator-first tools for minigames, custom content and community servers. It is Minecraft’s voxel look at a higher resolution, Notebookcheck says, and it comes from the people who made the Hypixel Minecraft server, which hosted minigames for the crafting game before the team formed its own studio.

Breaking the Curse | New Hytale Gameplay (16+ Minutes)Hytale · Watch on YouTube ↗

The long road back

The game was announced in 2018 and acquired by Riot, which funded it until June 2025, when Riot canceled it and dissolved Hypixel, Inverse writes. In November the original founders bought the game back and restarted development, and the studio reached an early-access launch about eight weeks after announcing the news, Notebookcheck notes. Collins-Laflamme said pre-sales alone have funded the next two years of development.

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Early access means bugs and changes. Insider Gaming says the game is not on Steam, with access through its own website, and the developers have polished the core systems of exploration, combat and building for launch. There is no announced end date for early access, per Inverse. The studio’s plans, including proximity chat and multiplayer portals, remain to come.

The timing suits a month when the internet is busy rewinding to 2016, the Minecraft-era peak for a lot of players. For Minecraft’s heirs, the first week will show whether a million-player day one turns into a community that stays. The next big games reveal on the calendar is Pokémon’s Generation 10 on Feb. 27.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.