Hytale has been canceled by Riot Games and Hypixel Studios a decade after the project first started development.
Hypixel Studios’ co-founder Aaron Donaghey, better known by the Hytale community as Noxy, broke the news in a post on Hytale’s website. “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,” Noxy wrote. “This is not the outcome any of us – at Hypixel or at Riot – wanted. But after years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise.”
Hytale is a standalone game project that sprouted from Hypixel, the popular Minecraft server from which Hytale’s development team gets its name. It was planned to be a Minecraft-like sandbox game that was more modder-friendly, incorporated more RPG elements, and featured numerous minigames for players to try out alongside the basic sandbox experience. To better understand the project’s ambitions, you should watch this developer diary that Riot Games released in 2021.
Noxy’s post about Hytale’s cancellation essentially admits that this was all too ambitious for the studio. That can be seen in the project’s lengthy development timeline. The project has roots going all the way back to 2015, and Riot Games acquired Hypixel in 2020, yet no release was in sight.
Noxy admits that “it became clear we’d need a lot more time to get it to a place where it could support the ambitious vision for the game,” even after a complete overhaul of the game engine being used to make Hytale. Rather than reducing the scope or adjusting the development timeline to make the project a reality, Hypixel Studios and Riot decided to cancel the game entirely.
Hypixel Studios will be shut down as a result, although Noxy says Hypixel’s developers are being “supported with generous severance and resources to help them find what’s next.” As for the Hypixel server that Hytale is based on, Noxy’s message explains that it is run separately from Hypixel Studios and will not be impacted by Hytale’s cancellation.
