According to Wccftech, Hytale’s original creator Simon Collins-Laflamme has repurchased the game from Riot Games just months after its June 2025 cancellation and is launching early access on January 13, 2026. The development team has rehired more than 40 former and new members, bringing the total to 50 developers working on the project. Collins-Laflamme is personally committing funding for many years and the team is returning to a four-year-old legacy build that had been abandoned. The early access version will be exactly what you’d expect – unfinished and buggy – with the creator explicitly telling potential customers not to pre-order if they’re uncomfortable with that reality. This marks a dramatic resurrection for the Minecraft-like MMO that started development in 2015 and was originally backed by Riot as angel investors before the acquisition.
From corporate grave to indie rebirth
This has to be one of the wildest turnaround stories in gaming history. A game gets cancelled by a massive publisher like Riot Games, the studio gets disbanded, and then the original creator buys it all back within months? That just doesn’t happen. Collins-Laflamme is basically pulling off the gaming equivalent of buying your childhood home back from the bank that foreclosed on it. But here’s the thing – they’re not picking up where they left off. They’re going back to a four-year-old build and merging over 300 GitHub branches. That’s like trying to reassemble a car that’s been sitting in a junkyard for years.
The brutal honesty of true early access
I’ve got to respect the transparency here. How many early access launches have we seen where developers promise the moon and deliver something that barely works? Collins-Laflamme is basically saying “This will be rough, don’t buy it if that bothers you.” That’s refreshing, but also kind of terrifying. They’re admitting the game will feel behind because they’re working from an older prototype build. So we’re not getting the polished version Riot was working on – we’re getting what amounts to a time capsule from 2022. The question is whether players will have the patience to watch this thing get rebuilt from the ground up.
The mountain they have to climb
Let’s talk about that 300 GitHub branches situation for a second. That’s not just a significant engineering effort – that’s a nightmare scenario. Each branch represents different features, fixes, and experiments that were never properly integrated. Merging that many divergent code paths into something stable enough for early access? That’s the kind of technical debt that sinks projects. And they’re doing this with a team of 50 people who probably just got rehired and are scrambling to remember how any of this code works. The fact they’re targeting January 2026 at all seems either incredibly ambitious or borderline reckless.
Back to the original vision
The most interesting part of this whole saga might be what they’re abandoning. The team is explicitly stepping away from the newer engine they were working on under Riot and returning to the original vision from the 2018 trailer. That tells you everything about why this acquisition happened. Riot probably wanted to turn Hytale into something more corporate, more monetizable, while the original team wanted to stick to their creative guns. Now they’re free to build the game they originally promised, but they’re doing it with older technology and what sounds like a much smaller budget. It’s the classic indie dream – creative freedom but limited resources. Whether that trade-off pays off remains to be seen, but you can’t help but root for them.
