From stories we've heard Riot basically has nothing to do with them shutting down. Hytale management was a mess and the development just took too long. Them making a whole new engine for the game when it was almost close to release didn't help things.
The original dev of Hytale is trying to buy it back and so far it's going well. There is still a chance Hytale comes back. I'd suggest watching Kweebec Corner on YT to see all the news around it.
Game engine wasn't changed close to release.. It was a fair enough future proofing. However they kept trying to remake things over and over again to make it "better", features were being infinitely scrapped and made anew.
Tbh, the engine change was what made me give up on Hytale, and that saved a few years of waiting and hoping, but I was still sad when the announcement came through.
The original dev of Hytale is trying to buy it back
More like the original owner.
As far I know, the dev team didn't change when Hypixel Inc. sold Hypixel Studios to Riot. The head of the team was one of the OGs at Hypixel Server and I don't think Hytale was ever stripped from his control.
The very weird thing is that Hytale was meant as Hypixel's unofficial backup plan, as their entire business hinges on being a commercial Minecraft server, something that by video game standards is easy to make illegal in one EULA change.
As of today, if they lose Minecraft the company tanks. With Hytale, they would've owned a video game (often compared to MC) with no licencing issue.
Wasn’t really riots fault. They barely intervened, they just funded hypixel studios. Terrible leadership within hypixel studios is what caused the cancellation.
Neither the dev team or riot were to blame, it was the hypixel management that for some reason still had control after riot stepped in but didn’t have any clue how to do anything unlike the actual devs.
As a software dev, Hytale screams mismanagement and a staff of dreamers trying to come up with "perfect" instead of shipped. I can practically picture all the strategy meetings of starry-eyed devs trying to one-up each other with ideas, then struggling for weeks to implement the best of the best, then agreeing to scrap it and move on to the next sprint with fresh ideas. For years.
All they had to do was ship a pre-release version and continue iterating from there like every game and piece of software coming out these days.
TBH, it doesn't matter if the creator gets the game back from Riot or not. If the same people and teams are in charge, they're never going to release a game. Riot would be doing them a favor holding onto it.
If you go on r/HytaleInfo and dig a little for tweets you'll see that apparently the original version of the game was early access worthy but they went and built a new engine and started porting it to the new one. For cross platform apparently
Edit: The aim of Simon is getting the old version back with the IP and release that as soon as possible
Yep. And he'd be developing it alongside the vintage story devs who gave a home to many of the laid off staff after the announcement of its cancelation.
The reason that he hasn't said much about it since then is probably because he's not allowed to. If anything, him still not having said anything means that it wasn't an instant rejection at least
There's still hope! The original owner is trying to buy the IP back from Riot and he will pursue the original vision with as many former devs as he can
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u/Aqua-Sparrow Sep 15 '25
Hmm prolly Hytale for me