**Hytale is canceled - Good riddance!**

asanetargoss, 2025-06-25 (updated 2025-11-26)

Word on the streets is that [Hytale got](https://hytale.com/news/2025/6/a-difficult-update-about-hytale) [canceled](https://xcancel.com/Noxywoxy/status/1937180229031940439). Some are mourning its premature death, hoping that it could have become a Minecraft competitor. Not I! Not only do I not regret this game not existing, but I had no expectation of it even coming close to a "Minecraft killer."

## Existing competitors

There are already many Minecraft-adjacent and Minecraft-inspired games. The Minecraft community even inspired and/or catalysed entire subgenres like open world, survival crafting, battle royale, and automation.

Minecraft's most notable direct competitors include:

- Terraria, a combat and exploration-focused voxel building game
- Vintage Story, a survival-focused game similar to TerraFirmaCraft
- Luanti, the inferior but playable open source alternative

And depending on what you spend your most time doing in Minecraft, there may be a game out there that's "like Minecraft" for that specific thing, including every Minecraft-inspired genre as well as roguelikes/roguelites. However, those probably wouldn't have competed with Hytale directly.

In any case, I don't feel Minecraft is hurting for competition. There are so many games out there.

## Dealbreaker 1: Anti-Cheat

Hytale was planning on using anti-cheat to prevent multiplayer cheating. This would have killed Minecraft-style modding in its cradle, because anti-cheat is by design supposed to prevent unauthorized modification of the game.

All three of Minecraft's direct competitors which I listed have at least the *capability* to have their core engine mechanics modified or swapped out. Both Terraria and Vintage Story allow for Minecraft-style modding, due to being built on top of a virtual machine with bytecode injection and namespacing, which is ideal for interoperability and having a grassroots-driven community.

It should also be noted that Terraria's modding community grew so big that TModLoader now has its own Steam page, which is blessed by the Terraria developers.

Hytale claimed that there would be Bedrock-style scripting, which has all the downsides of Luanti without the slight upside of being open source. This technical limitation, combined with the existing legacy of modding for other games, likely means that Hytale's modding ecosystem would have been comparatively disappointing.

And this is all assuming that Hytale wouldn't open up its own Bedrock-style marketplace. Don't get me wrong: I think mod developers should be allowed to earn money as they see fit! However, I wouldn't have put it past the Hytale team to impose heavy restrictions as a result of their control of their platform, assuming they were to go down that route.

On top of that, the anti-cheat which Hytale planned to use was Vanguard, which is a notorious kernel-level anti-cheat which endangers the security and privacy of your computer. 

## Dealbreaker 2: Multiplayer-focused

From a game design perspective: I'm at the point where if I see "better with friends" too many times in game reviews, I swear off said game.

From a business perspective: Running centralized servers costs money. Companies have to pay for servers. This changes incentives, which affects the way the game is developed. It also causes the game to have an expiration date, which is not so great for me, because I tend to fade in and out of games, with months or sometimes years in between.

## Dealbreaker 3: No Linux

Hytale said upfront that they weren't going to support a Linux version of the client. Even if you tried to run it on Linux via Proton, you wouldn't be able to, because of the Vanguard anti-cheat. Vanguard is so notoriously anti-Linux that it's a meme at this point.

Coincidentally, there's a higher-than-average rate of Linux usage among the Minecraft modding community.

## Dealbreaker 4: Riot Games

Riot Games wholly owns Hypixel, which developed Hytale.

Riot Games has been notorious for its poor work culture and workplace harassment. This alone was enough to make me swear off playing their games for life.

## Dealbreaker 5: Tencent

Riot Games is, in turn, wholly owned by Tencent, a large Chinese company.

Tencent owns WeChat and several other mobile apps. Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg controlled half of the most sensitive apps on your phone. Apps are some of the many businesses Tencent owns.

Like, I had no plans of giving Tencent a cent if I could help it (pun not intended). And yet... this company's wholly-owned subsidiary wanted to put a ring-0 anti-cheat in the Minecraft clone that runs on my computer? No thanks!

## Good riddance

Now you can probably understand why I rest easy at night at the prospect of Hytale's cancellation.

I had no personal interest in playing this game. If Hytale had come out, it would be borderline unethical for me to recommend it to anyone. On top of that, the game's community longevity would be uncertain, and the modding community would have been middling at best.

It would be cool if Hytale was open sourced, but I wouldn't hold my breath because most companies in the game industry are not that cool.

## Hytale ownership update

According to a Hytale team blog post on November 17 2025[^hytaleblog202511], Hytale has separated from Hypixel Studios and is now fully independent. This coincides with a revival of the project and a change in development direction.

Most notably on the engine side, they are discarding the newer C++ engine in favor of the older but more complete C#/Java based engine. The C++ engine was something I failed to mention when I wrote the original Hytale article; even disregarding the anti-cheat, it would have made Minecraft-style modding much more difficult due to how native compilers work. The Hytale team spins this discarded C++ engine as a, "cross-platform" engine, which strikes me as an odd statement given that Java and to a lesser extent C# are more cross-platform by design than C++[^virtualmachines]. As for OS support, details on porting are noncommital. One would think, especially given Hytale's long development, that if they re-hired the developers that knew the game "inside and out" that they would know how feasible it was to port the game at this point.

They give a lot of lip service to modding in this blog post too, claiming that "Modding is once again a top priority." They claim they will "provide server source code access"[^hytaleblog202511], which presumably will be visible source and is promising, however details on the moddability of the client remains sparse, and it's not clear if the Hytale team is even planning on removing anti-cheat from the client. I'm sure they had Bukkit derivatives and the highly-optimized Minecraft server re-implementations in mind when they decided to aim for server source access. Furthermore, Simon writes that, "Hytale will take 0% from modders and server owners for at least the first 2 years"[^first2years]; which seems to suggest a Bedrock-style marketplace is on the roadmap; and Forge-style server modding may be restricted to comply with Hytale's monetization rules and platform control. For server mods, the Minecraft server mod grey market may act as a reference point for them.

While Hytale's initial testing release is to be limited in scope, minigames are still a large item on the roadmap[^hytaleblog202511]. Combined with their mention of server source code access, multiplayer appears to remain a gameplay focus. I've explained above why I'm not a big fan of multiplayer-focused games, and I'm not optimistic here, especially given Hypixel's history of pay-to-win monetization.

Overall, Hytale seems as overhyped as ever, and the Hytale Team does not hesitate to board this hype train. The common over-arching theme, implied by the Hytale Team and expressed explicitly in Antvenom's interview[^antvenom], remains the desire or hope that someone compete with Minecraft. I've already explained above why I think Minecraft has plenty of competition in terms of the number of games. I will add, that given Hytale's noncommital porting plans[^hytaleblog202511], Hytale will not be "competing" with Minecraft Bedrock on the more locked down iOS/Android[^android]/console platforms in the near future.

Nevertheless, with a revival and newfound independence, the Hytale team has another shot at releasing a game. I still think the hype is unwarranted, and I remain skeptical for anything that Hytale team says at this point. But at least it's not owned by Riot/Tencent anymore.




[^hytaleblog202511]: https://hytale.com/news/2025/11/hytale-is-saved

[^virtualmachines]: Unless the platform has a policy of banning the running of virtual machines, in which case modding probably wouldn't be possible anyway.

[^first2years]: https://twitter.com/Simon_Hypixel/status/1990861531920154843

[^antvenom]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAwZg-HzWDU

[^android]: Google [recently plans](https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/android_developer_verification_sideloading/) to ban the owner's ability to install software of their choice on their own computer in the near future, so with regret I must add Android to the list.