Hytale Development Resumes as Riot Returns IP to Original Co-Founder, Putting Players First

Did not have this on my 2025 bingo card: Hytale is alive again. After being canceled and nearly buried, the game and the Hypixel brand are back under their original co-founder, and development has restarted for real.

What just happened

On November 17, 2025, Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme said he has bought back the full Hytale IP and the Hypixel brand from Riot Games. He says the game is back in active development under a new, self-funded plan. If you remember the June 2025 cancellation and studio shutdown, you are not imagining things — this is a full-on rescue.

Quick rewind: how we got here

Riot acquired Hypixel Studios in 2020 with the idea that big-company resources would help Hytale hit its very ambitious, cross-platform vision. Instead, the project spent years doing technical resets, shifting its design goals, and getting more complex. By June 2025, the studio publicly admitted it could not ship the game, canceled development, and began shutting Hypixel Studios down. Riot says this new sale was done with the community in mind.

The buyback: a last-chance play

Behind the scenes, Collins-Laflamme and co-founder Philippe Touchette were already trying to save it. Without even knowing the exact state of the codebase, they went to Riot and offered to buy the project back — an offer Collins-Laflamme says was well above what the game would be worth on paper. Riot looked at multiple proposals and ultimately chose to send Hytale 'home.'

Within weeks of striking the deal, Collins-Laflamme rehired more than 30 former Hytale developers, including people who built the original systems, lore, and tools before the 2020 acquisition. More hires are expected in the coming days, and the team says work has already resumed under a 10-year, self-funded plan.

The big pivot: ripping out Riot's engine

Here is the under-the-hood twist: the version Riot was building used a new cross-platform C++ engine. According to Collins-Laflamme, that branch was far behind on gameplay and would have needed about two more years of foundational work just to reach early access. The revived Hytale is scrapping that approach and returning to the Legacy Engine the game started on.

That legacy build is roughly four years old, rough in spots, and full of placeholder content — but it is playable now. That makes it the fastest path to letting people actually touch the game again.

What early access will look like

• What you can play at launch: Exploration Mode, Creative Mode, and full modding support (including custom servers).
• What will not be there at first: Adventure Mode and official Minigames.
• State of the build: running on the older Legacy Engine; playable but messy; expect bugs, unstable systems, and frequent updates that might break things.

'Hytale has had a long and challenging journey. This is not going to be easy. This is not going to be fast. This is not going to be perfect. But it is going to be ours.'

So, when?

No hard date yet, but the team keeps saying 'soon' for early access. Given the engine reset and the goal of getting something out quickly, it sounds like the plan is to ship sooner rather than prettier.

Bottom line: Hytale is messy, janky, and unfinished — and somehow back from the dead. I would not have bet on this, but here we are. If you have been waiting since the first reveal, you might finally get to play it in early access before too long.