Hytale’s story so far has been a roller coaster. That roller coaster, after ten years in development, seems to have just hit the highest of highs, though.
After its tumultuous development, the Minecraft-like title entered early access yesterday, and its developer revealed that, at one point, the game had almost three million concurrent players.
Hytale Becomes One Of The Most-Played Early Access Games Of All Time
More than ten years ago, in 2015, developers from the Minecraft server Hypixel began developing Hytale. After initially helping fund the title, Riot Games purchased Hypixel Studios, with a commitment to launching the game. In June 2025, however, Riot cancelled the project.
What ensued were months of negotiations between Hypixel creator Simon Collins-Laflamme and Riot, during which Collins-Laflamme sought to purchase the IP back from the League of Legends developers. After a final round of negotiations in November, Collins-Laflamme purchased the IP, and the project was revived. This leads us to yesterday, when Hytale finally hit early access.
The team at Hypixel Studios had high hopes for Hytale’s early access launch, expecting around 1 million players to turn out. They were way off, though.
On a public Hytale server where the game’s creator, Collins-Laflamme, was active under the username Simon, it was revealed that the game reached almost 3 million concurrent users.
“2.8 [Million] at the moment. I’ve got the admin panel up still,” Collins-Laflamme told server members, which was captured and uploaded in a video on YouTube.
While the game hasn’t launched on Steam, partly because the development team didn’t want to deal with review bombing, Hytale’s launch has been stellar. Its 2.8 million player peak would put it second in the platform’s all-time concurrent player charts, just behind PUBG’s 3.25 million, according to SteamDB. Its tally does, however, eclipse games like Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, Counter-Strike 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds.
It’s not only the players who were invested in Hytale’s early access launch, either. As spotted by PC Gamer, the title became the most-watched game on Twitch, with a further 420,000 viewers tuning in to see what the fuss was about.
2.8 [Million] at the moment. I’ve got the admin panel up still.
It was confirmed ahead of launch that Hypixel had secured funding for the next two years, putting the game on track to be supported for ten years, as promised by Collins-Laflamme. It seems, though, that after such a successful early access launch, Hytale will be fully self-sustainable. With such an impressive day one uptake, it looks set to be a long-running hit.
- Released
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January 13, 2026
- Developer(s)
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Hypixel Studios
- Publisher(s)
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Hypixel Studios
- Early Access Release
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January 13, 2026
