Earlier this week we had the unfortunate duty to report that Hytale, the Minecraft-like MMORPG being developed by Riot Games-owned Hypixel Studios, was fully cancelled along with its studio being shut down. At the time there were presumptions about what happened and whether Riot was to blame, but several former devs are now speaking out, and it looks as if this one fell victim to executives who joined Hypixel thinking they knew better.

The tea started spilling almost immediately after the news broke, starting off with some scathing remarks from former IT lead DevSlashNull. “What could possibly go wrong when you hire new leadership that thinks the original team is incompetent? Oh the whole project ends up going in circles until it dies,” he opined. “The community should be angry at the mismanagement that stole the opportunity for Hytale to flourish.” Replies from him to the tweet further clarified that problems “were all internal to Hytale’s leadership” and not to Riot.

This sentiment of misguided directives from Hypixel execs was mirrored in tweets from former principal engineer Silkey, who argued that “systems that were already far ahead of Minecraft at the time were completely re-invented to make them ‘even better’ resulting fuck all” – an assertion that was backed by a former senior animation lead NinjaCharlieT, who created one of Hytale’s trailers. “We had a strict internal rule: nothing shown unless it already existed,” he writes. “It was rendered ingame using tools and systems we had at the time, many of which lost support in the newer engine direction.”

Finally of note is insight from former Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme, who provided some deeper revelations during his time working on the game between 2016 and 2019. In this lengthy post, he admits that development of Hytale was burning “maybe $350K-400K a month” and expressed regret over walking away from an apparently much larger agreement in favor of Riot because he believed Riot would give Hypixel the best chance of success.

Finally, Collins-Laflamme tries to divert blame away from Hypixel CEO Noxy, instead blaming the so-called “real” game producers who, in his estimation, used Hytale to try to prove something to Riot, the presence of whom was apparently enough to make him feel like an imposter within his own studio.

“Yes ultimately he’s responsible as the CEO but I feel like it’s because Noxy trusted and hired ‘real’ producers with ‘real game’ experience from the game industry and let them drive the project into something else with bigger plans, and they started to rewrite ton of features, systems and even the engine. As if they wanted to appropriate the game to themselves to prove to the world / riot they were better. I don’t f’ing know, we never talked about it but this is how I felt it was going from an external POV.”