Hitail debuts with a whopping 2.8 million concurrent users

Hitail's story so far has been a roller coaster. But it looks like the roller coaster has just reached its peak after 10 years of development.

After a tumultuous development, the Minecraft-like title entered Early Access yesterday, and the developer said the game had nearly 3 million concurrent players at one point.

Hytale has become one of the most played Early Access games of all time

A hightail character exploring a cave with a torch.

More than 10 years ago, in 2015, the developers of the Minecraft server Hypixel began developing Hytale. After initially funding the title, Riot Games acquired Hypixel Studios to publish the game. However, in June 2025, Riot canceled the project.

This led to months of negotiations between Hypixel creator Simon Collins-Laflamme and Riot, during which Collins-Laflamme attempted to buy the IP back from the League of Legends developer. After final negotiations in November, Collins-Laflamme purchased the IP and the project was revived. This brings us to yesterday, when Hytale finally achieved early access.

The team at Hypixel Studios had high hopes for Hytale's early access launch, predicting it would draw around 1 million players. But they were far away.

On the public Hytale server, where the game's creator Collins-Laflamme played under the username Simon, the game was found to have nearly 3 million concurrent users.

“2.8 [Million] now. “The admin panel is still on,” Collins-Laflamme told server members, which was captured and uploaded on video to YouTube.

Although the game never released on Steam, in part because the development team didn't want to deal with review bombs, Hytale's release was stellar. According to SteamDB, the 2.8 million player peak would place it second on the platform's all-time concurrent players chart, just behind PUBG's 3.25 million. However, its record surpasses games like Black Myth: Wukong, Palworld, Counter-Strike 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds.

Players aren't the only ones invested in Hightail's early access launch. As PC Gamer discovered, 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] now. The admin panel is still turned on.

Ahead of launch, it was confirmed that Hypixel has secured funding for the next two years and is on track to support the game for 10 years, as Collins-Laflame promised. But after this successful early access launch, it looks like Hytale will be fully self-sustaining. With such impressive first-day leverage, it looks like it will be a long-term hit.