After a drawn-out development that can generously be described as very rough, Hytale launched into early access earlier this week, a long overdue accomplishment acknowledged by none other than League of Legends studio Riot Games.
“Congrats on early access,” Riot posted on X, along with a fistbump emoji. In response, Hytale posted a salute emoji and wrote, “Thank you for helping bring Hytale home.”
It’s a small, low-key exchange, but notable nonetheless for one very obvious reason: Riot acquired Hypixel Studios in 2020, not long after Hypixel gave us our first look at Hytale, and then a half-decade later pulled the plug on the whole thing and shut the studio down without anything to show for it. Hypixel co-founder Noxy, who went to Riot along with the studio, said when the game was cancelled that “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.”
That happens sometimes, sure, but the situation took something of an awkward twist when, after some presumably fast-and-furious negotiations, founder Simon Collins-Laflamme bought it all back from Riot, and less than two months later rolled out an early access release that became an immediate hit. Hytale isn’t on Steam so we don’t have access to player numbers, but it racked up more than 420,000 viewers on Twitch when it went live, becoming the most-watched game on the platform, and that points to good things.
Also notable, Collins-Laflamme said the day before launch that Hytale had “officially secured the next two years of development costs through pre-purchases.”
And it’s not just a matter of pent-up hype that’ll fizzle out quickly. Collins-Laflamme has previously warned that Hytale “isn’t good yet,” but PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston says that actually, it is. “It’s very early access,” Chris wrote of his early time with the game, with plenty of incomplete or missing content, “but what’s here and working works well.”
Riot might be feeling a little bit of a sting on this one—the decidedly subdued message reminds me of Phil Spencer congratulating Valve for announcing new Steam hardware in 2025—but it’s just as possible the studio is happy enough to be done with it, and it’s to Riot’s credit that it was willing to sell Hytale back to its creators instead of locking it in the IP vault. Riot had big-publisher aspirations some years ago but it didn’t really work out, and more recently it’s been stepping back from those ambitions so it can refocus on League of Legends instead. Either way, it’s a classy move, and it’s nice to see that publicly at least, there are no hard feelings.
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