These put paid to many of Hypixel's monetisation strategies. Mojang, in a bid to reduce the amount of bad actors using the Minecraft platform for nefarious means (including paid DDoS attacks, of which the Mirai botnet was perhaps the most notorious example), introduced new commercial rules for Minecraft servers. If you want more great long-form games journalism like this every month, delivered straight to your doorstop or your inbox, why not subscribe to Edge here.Īnd then, the EULA happened. This Hytale feature first appeared in Edge Magazine. The income was more than enough to sustain the server, and a team of around 40 people. And the server was making good money from its microtransactions, too.
"And during those nine months, I just completely fell in love with the team, I fell in love with the project, I fell in love with the community." The work, which saw the team spinning up fresh minigames in sometimes as little as a week (SkyWars, one of its most popular, took six days to make, and almost immediately drew in millions of players), was fast-paced and creatively fulfilling. "It's not every day you come across some people who have something that's really special, who maybe don't actually understand it at that point." Already part of the way into the interview process for a job at Riot Games, Donaghey asked whether he could help out on Hypixel in the interim. "I say, 'Oh wow, you've got 20,000 users so far.' They're like, 'No, we've got 20,000 users online right now.' I'm like, 'What?'" he laughs. "They're like, 'Yeah, we've got 20,000 users'," Donaghey says. It was here that he met the Hypixel team. Part of the job was attending conferences such as Minecraft Expo, which was part of Insomnia Gaming Festival. He ended up getting a job at game server host Multiplay helping with customer support as, in his words, "the Minecraft guy at the company". Indeed, it drew in Donaghey, too: an indie developer and a Minecraft player since beta, a kind of server-slash-social experiment called CivCraft "opened my eyes to the possibilities of things that could be done in Minecraft". Unsurprisingly, in hindsight, these short, fast, rewarding and even social minigames soon became the main draw of the server. The solution? Introduce short, entertaining minigames to keep people occupied: snowball fights, or Quake homages, or even a curious thing called 'Hunger Games', inspired by a new film series, where you'd battle to be the last player standing in an ever-shrinking arena. There were sometimes hundreds of people queuing in the lobby waiting for their adventure to begin. And so Collins-Laflamme and Touchette decided to run a server that would function as a playable library of all their adventure maps, where players could simply join the server to access a suite of games.
Many did not: the process of hunting for hidden folders, ensuring the server config was working, and that your chosen mod was compatible with the version of the game you were using as well as the client you were using it with, was a headache.
Players were getting very good at using Minecraft's creation tools – most often redstone, the game's simplified version of electronics – to build complicated contraptions and incorporate them into 'adventure maps', focused campaigns that others could download and play, provided they had the technical know-how to get it running. Started by Simon Collins-Laflamme and Philippe Touchette, it was one of the many fan-made Minecraft servers that popped up in 2013. Black Friday game deals: see all the best offers right now!īefore Hytale, there was Hypixel.It undeniably changes things." From Hypixel to Hytale "I don't want to come across like, 'Oh, we're burdened with all this interest'," he laughs. The eyes of thousands of players, and some of the biggest players in the game industry, are now very much upon the project he's leading. 500,000, I'm happy, and a million, I'm like, super happy." At the end of the first week, the trailer hit 11 million views. "In my head, you know, anything below 250,000, I'm disappointed. "We had an internal poll on how many views," Donaghey says. But the trailer – which showed off features such as a realistically lit and animated world, adventure and minigame modes, extensive modding, an in-game animation tool and even live scripting – immediately struck a chord. His fear was that Hytale – a game with more than a passing resemblance to Minecraft, created by many people with a background in running a successful Minecraft server – would be dismissed as yet another title destined for the ever-growing blockgame graveyard.