The abrupt collapse of Minecraft-inspired sandbox game Hytale has at times eclipsed the magnitude of the Hypixel Minecraft server that started all this – which, according to its founder, is still very much smashing it.
Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme, who's recently made headlines over suggestions that he'd spend up to $25 million buying Hytale back from Riot just to see it finished, recently announced that the Hypixel Minecraft server, for the PC Java edition, has seen "38,717,739 unique players" in its 13-year history.
"That's about $1,161,532,170 USD worth of Minecraft accounts," Collins-Laflamme added. This $1.1 billion figure uses the $30 rate for the standard PC edition of Minecraft, which includes Minecraft: Bedrock Edition and Minecraft: Java Edition.
If we use the $40 deluxe collection instead, the value of those accounts jumps over $1.5 billion. Of course, this is all applying the current price of Minecraft to 13 years worth of accounts, when in reality the game was a fair bit cheaper in its earliest days.
That said, this is still a staggering total player count. "An estimated half of players who bought this version of Minecraft played once on Hypixel!" Collins-Laflamme says, adding that the server is "still growing after 13 years."
According to Minecraft MP and Minecraft Server List rankings, Hypixel is also still the most active Minecraft server today. Both sites put it in first place with over 34,000 players online at the time of writing, which is quite a leap over the runnerups.
Hypixel development remains very active as well. Just last week, patch 0.23.2 hit Hypixel Skyblock, adding "the fifth and final tier Spider Slayer boss, being a step up from the Tier V Revenant Horror. It brings with it not just several exciting new drops that aim to alter the overarching slayer progression, but also several key revamps to older items."
Granted, I haven't played Minecraft in a long time, but these patch notes make it pretty clear that Hypixel has essentially spun off into its own thing, using Minecraft as a medium more so than a design reference.
Not even beloved Minecraft servers are immune to live service woes, though. In a reply to the patch notes, Hypixel staffer Donpireso tells frustrated players that "the missing stuff" in the update is "still on the way," admitting that it "would probably have been a better idea for us to delay the update a few days and add the rest."
Minecraft is finally making copper useful with a new tier of tools bridging the gap from stone to iron, and a long-lost mob returning as the automatic item sorter fans have wanted for years.
