Although Hytale will (finally) be releasing in early access at the start of 2026, it won’t be releasing on Steam when it does… and the team behind the game have finally explained why.
Hytale, the voxel-art love letter to Minecraft, will be making its way to our PCs on January 13 2026, after ten long years of development hell.
Considering the ordeal that the development team has gone through trying to release the game, you’d assume that they’d probably want it to be accessible on the number one PC gaming storefront in existence.
However, it turns out that Hypixel Studios will be skipping Steam when it drops next year. Why? Because the team isn’t interested in chasing “a flood of cold first impressions”.
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In fact, as Executive Director Patrick Debric explained in a new blog post on Hytale's official website, Hypixel Studios believes that they "might never need" to release the game on Steam... ever.
“We want to spend our time in Early Access working with our existing community to improve the game, rather than chasing a flood of cold first impressions that could overcorrect the game's direction”, Debric revealed.
“We don’t shy away from honest, negative criticism; we have been very critical of the state of the game ourselves on social media. We simply want the first steps of our journey to be influenced by informed players rather than large-scale first impressions from those unfamiliar with the game’s development background.”
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The funny thing is, since this story began to pick up traction on several other sites, the blog post in question has actually been “reworded”.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of outlets opted to misconstrue the blog post entirely, by implying that the devs are avoiding Steam so that nobody says anything mean about the game.
Personally, I see where Debric is coming from. When it comes to early access titles, Steam reviewers can be absolutely braindead sometimes. The amount of times I’ve seen people complain that an early access game is “unfinished” boggles the mind.
I think Hypixel just wants to get the game into fans’ hands as quickly as possible, because they want to assure the people who have followed the project since 2015 that it isn’t simply vaporware.
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If anything, the version of the Hytale they’re planning to release in January looks a lot more like a playable proof of concept than a full game to me– and the devs haven’t made any attempt at hiding that either.
Steam simply isn’t the right kind of platform for that sort of early access title, especially when a series of thoughtless reviews could damage the game’s long-term success.