Hytale Becomes the Most-Watched Game on Twitch on Early Access Launch Day

It’s been a banner launch day for Hytale, the new sandbox game from the creators of popular Minecraft server Hypixel. In addition to a surge of players and a lot of positive buzz, it’s shot up to become, briefly, the most popular game on Twitch, with over 420k viewers.

This was observed first by PC Gamer, who earlier today clocked that it was the most-watched game on Twitch and the second-most-watched category, only behind Just Chatting by about 43k views. At the time this piece was written, Hytale had dropped down to around 260k viewers, but is still the most-watched video game and the third-most-watched category. It’s now behind both Just Chatting and football (soccer, for the Americans) league Kings League. And it seems possible that it will surge further in the coming days.

It’s a heck of a comeback story for a game that, half a year ago, was thought to be canceled entirely. Hytale, made by the developers of wildly popular Minecraft server Hypixel, was first announced in 2018 with an incredibly popular trailer, and garnered plenty of buzz at the time. Riot Games took notice, invested, and in 2020 acquired it entirely. However, Hytale was delayed several times as its scope grew, and just this past year was canceled entirely by Riot. Then, in November, co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme announced he had acquired the IP rights back from Riot, and in an incredibly fast turnaround, he and the team got the game ready for an early access release today.

In addition to its popularity on Twitch, Hytale has already made enough money to cover two more years of development, and its modding scene is already bustling day one. Someone’s even got Doom running in it. Though we’re still waiting for confirmation from Hypixel as to how many players are checking it out today, Collins-Laflamme made a bold prediction of one million players on day one. We’ll hopefully soon see if that’s come true.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].