Hytale debuts with a whopping 2.8 million concurrent players

Hytale's story has been a roller coaster so far. That roller coaster, after ten years in development, seems to have just reached its peak.

After its tumultuous development, the Minecraft-like title entered early access yesterday, and its developer revealed that, at one point, the game had nearly three million concurrent players.

Hytale became one of the most played Early Access games of all time

Hightail character exploring a cave with a torch.

More than ten years ago, in 2015, the developers of the Minecraft server HyPixel started developing Hytale. After initially helping fund the title, Riot Games purchased Hypixel Studios, with a commitment to launch the game. In June 2025, however, riots canceled the project.

HyPixel creator Simon Collins-Laflamme and Riot had been in negotiations for months, with Collins-Laflamme trying to buy back the IP from the League of Legends developers. After the final round of negotiations in November, Collins-Laflamme purchased the IP, and the project was revived. That brings us to yesterday, when Hytale finally hit early access.

The team at Hypixel Studios had high hopes for Hytale's Early Access launch, expecting around 1 million players to turn out. They were far away though.

On the public Hytale server where the game's creator, Collins-Laflamme, was active under the username Simon, it was revealed that the game reached nearly 3 million concurrent users.

2.8 [Million] At this time. I still have the admin panel,” Collins-Laflamme told server members, which was captured in a video uploaded to YouTube.

While the game hasn't launched on Steam, partly because the development team didn't want to deal with the review bombing, Hytale's launch has been stellar. Its 2.8 million player peak puts it second on the platform's all-time concurrent player charts, behind PUBG's 3.25 million, according to SteamDB. However, its tally eclipses games like Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, Counter-Strike 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds.

Gamers aren't the only ones investing in Hytale's early access launch. As seen by PC Gamer, the title became the most watched game on Twitch, with an additional 420,000 viewers tuning in to see what the fuss was about.

2.8 [Million] At this time. I still have the admin panel.

As promised by Collins-Laflamme, it was confirmed before launch that HyPixel had secured funding for the next two years, putting it on track to support the game for ten years. It seems, though, that after such a successful Early Access launch, Hytale will be completely self-sustaining. With such an impressive daily uptake, it looks set to be a long-running hit.