**Hytale is canceled - Good riddance!**

asanetargoss, 2025-06-25

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.