Minecraft might finally get the competitor the industry so desperately needs

Minecraft has reigned supreme over a niche genre that it essentially made. It drew the lines in its own sand and stayed there for over a decade, with no one being the wiser. But now, with a game rising from the ashes like a phoenix, Minecraft could finally get some real competition.

Enter: Hytale, the game Riot Games purchased, killed, and then sold back to its original owners. It has gone through a decade of ups and downs, five years at Riot Games, and is now in the hands of those who initially created it. And in this entire decade, it’s never been closer to release than it is now, or so says Simon Collins-Laflamme, the creator of Hypixel and Hytale, who is now leading development.

From videos released by Hypixel over the past few days, we can determine that Hytale is not fooling around. It has significantly expanded combat, movement, and mechanics over Minecraft, and appears to be an overall upgraded and modernized version of Notch’s masterpiece. And that tracks with Hytale itself evolving out of Minecraft, first as the wildly popular Hypixel server, and now as a standalone game.

Though many thought the game would never see the light of day after entering a state of limbo while handled by Riot Games, Hytale now has a real chance to shake up the foundations laid by Minecraft for, well, itself. It has been the sole game in this niche voxel-based survival crafting genre and, while there have been notable attempts at taking over some of its market share, it’s remained a dominant force in gaming for well over a decade.

A prominent example is A Vintage Story, which takes liberal inspiration from Minecraft, but makes the game much more challenging and focused on the survival aspect, complicating everything that was streamlined in the latter. Of course, this adds loads of depth and mechanical intricacy to the game, but it does largely alienate a more casual, laid-back, and, most importantly, young audience.

With over 230 million copies sold across basically every imaginable platform, Minecraft is also the best-selling game of all time, which is a title hardly any game will be able to beat.

But Hytale stands to shift the tides.

Naturally, I do not expect (nor should anyone, really) that Hytale will dethrone Minecraft. The latter has become somewhat of a cultural cornerstone in gaming and a title on which many of us have been brought up. Everyone and their dad had a squad of friends way back when making a new survival server, playing until they got bored, and leaving the game for a year before repeating the process. It’s a shrine, a temple we all go back to every once in a while to reminisce about the good old days.

But what Hytale can do is provide an alternative. A better, more complex, more detailed, and more, well, fun experience that takes what Minecraft has done and ups the ante in every imaginable way.

By inviting the community to pitch ideas and help develop them, Hypixel is also involving the players on a scale never seen in Minecraft, and the low $19.99 price, alongside no charges for servers for at least two years, will substantially expand the community side of things and speed up Hytale‘s establishment as the go-to co-op survival crafting game.

This is an uphill battle, and it remains to be seen how Hytale will go about it. What I’m sure of is that, based on just how popular the game already is without even being released, the market, and this niche Minecraft-adjacent genre, are in for an earthquake.

And, as always, that can only lead to good things for the player. More competition means more development, innovation, and progress, and God knows Minecraft needs all of that.