No, it’s not Minecraft 2, it’s Hytale. It may look like it with all its voxel art, but it’s an experience that may shape up to be more like a Terraria or a Valheim. Although perhaps Hytale’s reputation proceeds itself and this comparison isn’t necessary. Some readers may have been following this game’s development–its announcement trailer back in 2019 got over 61 million views–and it seems like the game’s long, long road to release is finally here. It’s tomorrow, January 13th, in fact. And the lead developer of the game, Simon Collins-Laflamme, claimed on X that the game is expecting a lot of traffic:

IMPORTANT

We expect over 1 million players on the early access release day for Hytale (January 13). Please download the launcher today and log in now to help us significantly reduce launch-day stress. Let us know if you are having any issues.

Download now:… pic.twitter.com/kiMYIkKmJI

— Simon (@Simon_Hypixel) January 11, 2026

An estimate of one million players on launch is an incredibly high number for a game of Hytale’s size. After all, triple-A behemoths like Battlefield 6 and Marvel Rivals didn’t even clock those numbers on Steam on their premiere days. But maybe this isn’t a bombastic claim. Hytale has a few things going for it that might help it reach that number. For one, it was made by the same developers of one of Minecraft’s most popular public servers, Hypixel, and as such has garnered a lot of attention from the millions of unique users (50% of the Minecraft Java Edition playerbase in 2020) and prominent content creators who frequent it. For two, its development for a while was actually supported by Riot Games of League of Legends fame, who acquired Hypixel Studios in 2020, though in June of last year they cancelled the project. For three, in a wild turn of events, Collins-Laflamme actually bought the IP and the studio back from Riot only a few months later in November, and the post announcing this got over 12 million views. And now, only two months away from the re-acquisition, the anticipated game is releasing in early-access. That type of turn around is almost unheard of in the industry, and from the state that the previous developers asserted that the game was in at the time of cancellation, which was that of overwhelming scope to after years of technical revisions, it’s hard to believe that Hytale is really here. Lastly, though it will be an early-access title, Collins-Laflamme also announced today that the next two years of development funding has been completely accounted for by the sheer number of pre-orders of the game. So with all that in mind, it isn’t a huge stretch to imagine the player count soaring to a million tomorrow. That would make for a well-deserved victory lap.