It might have taken a decade of development, cancellation, and miraculous project revival, but Hytale, the Minecraft-esque voxel sandbox RPG, has finally launched in early access. As a metric for just how much hype Hytale has built up, its first announcement trailer has amassed an absurd 62 million views since it was uploaded in 2018. We are, eternally, yearning to play with blocks.
For Hytale, that yearning seems to have paid off. After going live earlier today, Hytale is at time of writing the most watched game on Twitch by far, attracting over 420,000 viewers across thousands of streams.
A cursory survey of those launch streams seems to indicate that many day one players are being brutally savaged by the bears roaming Hytale’s forests, which—if you’re wondering—matches the early experiences of PC Gamer staff. There’s a bear outside my starting hut as I write this. It’s not going well.
But things do seem to be going well for Hytale. Yesterday, Hytale developer Hypixel announced that pre-purchases had already secured the next two years of early access development costs. And while we don’t have a way to access current player counts, it seems likely that launch day activity will meet Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme’s expectations of over one million day one players.
Meanwhile, a quick glance at Google Trends shows a massive jump in worldwide Hytale search interest over the last 24 hours. Not quite the same as live player counts, but you work with what you can get.
As expected of an early access launch—particularly one where there may or may not be a million players slamming the servers—there have been some early wrinkles that Hypixel is in the process of ironing out. On X, Hypixel devs are currently gathering feedback ahead of pushing Hytale’s inaugural hotfix to address a series of bug-related crashes.
It also looks like many would-be Hytale players have been left waiting for account verification emails, presumably as a result of Hypixel’s infrastructure struggling to keep up with demand. After years where it looked like Hytale was dead and buried, however, I imagine that’s a problem that Hypixel is happy to have.
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