What happened to Minecraft rival Hytale? Riot cancels the game and shuts studio after 10 years in development
Riot Games
announced the cancellation of
Hytale
. Its long-awaited
sandbox RPG
, developed by
Hypixel Studios
, will begin winding down the studio in the coming months. Despite years of effort and high expectations, developers say they could not deliver the game they had envisioned without compromising its core identity.
The game, in development since 2015 and fully backed by Riot since its acquisition in 2020, was intended to blend creative block-building with deep RPG mechanics and robust modding tools .
According to a post by co-founder and CEO Aaron Donaghey (aka 'Noxy'), despite ambitious vision and a major engine reboot, the team concluded the project was 'still not as far along as it needed to be' after ten years of development.
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While options like scaling back scope, changing timelines, or narrowing focus were considered, each compromise risked undermining the essence of what made Hytale unique, denying the experience the developers believed players deserved.
Donaghey expressed gratitude to Riot for continued support, including efforts to secure external investment to sustain the project, and for providing generous severance and resources to the team during this transition.
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'Game development is brutally hard,' he reflected, admitting the evolving genre and rising technical ambitions ultimately exceeded feasible boundaries.
Why Hytale Was Cancelled?
After years of evolving game scope and restarting the engine, first in C#, then ported to C++, Hytale became too large and costly to complete as envisioned.
Developers rejected the compromise. Narrowing features or trimming timelines would have, in their view, diluted the soul of Hytale, making it unrecognizable from its original pitch.
As competing sandbox and rival modding platforms advanced, the expectations for Hytale soared. Even with Riot's aid, the game failed to keep up structurally and creatively.
Background & Legacy
Originally funded by Riot in 2015 and fully acquired by 2020, Hytale generated massive excitement with its debut trailer, garnering over 31 million views within a month.
It promised procedurally generated fantasy biomes, deep RPG elements, modding frameworks, cinematic tools, and support for player-created content.
Despite this promise, development remained in pre‑beta stages by mid-2024, when the team undertook a full engine migration that delayed progress.
By June 2025, the decision to cancel was made, in part because the evolving scope and resources needed kept growing while the game's realization lagged far behind its initial promise.
Riot reportedly laid off around 150
Hypixel
employees as a result. Hypixel's popular Minecraft minigame server remains operational, its separately managed entity will continue unaffected.
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