When I first looked at this subreddit in it’s infancy, many people loved to hate on Minecraft while it was the game that truly inspired Hytale. The easiest point to make is to clearly show Mojang’s progress in the long period of updates and little amount of features they’ve accomplished during Microsoft’s reign compared to Hytale’s 3 years of development before the trailer came out.
While I’ve been running a Minecraft server and slowly learning all the massive flaws with Minecraft, I am going to touch upon why Minecraft Java Edition will lose to Hytale in the long-run.
Mojang sucks at coding
At base, Notch when making this game accomplished something many people had not done at the time. He made a voxel game that could run on a massive scale. Making a voxel game is incredibly difficult optimization-wise as there are many aspects to being able to render so many cubes. While you might see a complicated game like Overwatch render so many things, you aren’t making as many draw calls as you would be when rendering many individual voxels. It is easy to make a voxel game, but, it isn’t easy to optimize it. Minecraft was inspired by many games, including the Infiniminer for it’s voxel based atmosphere, a game that many people don’t know about.
For some reason, there are two donkey dupes that have stayed in the game for ages. Donkeys have been around since 1.6.1, the horse update, which was an update all the way in 2013. Mojang has made many “optimizations” to the game while /u/TheMasterCaver reports that he could load a heavily modded version of Minecraft 1.6 in a tenth of it’s time compared to Minecraft 1.13.
I went and loaded up FTB Ultimate Reloaded for 1.12.2 which has over 130 mods and I managed to run it better on my 1080 ti than a 1.16 snapshot.
At this rate, the game will keep getting “optimized” to the point where almost no one can play this game. It’s been half of a year now and the author of Optifine hasn’t even been able to officially release the 1.15 version of the game. Hytale has already said in their FAQ that you can handle Hytale on a decent render distance for a low-end computer. If Minecraft Java Edition isn’t even playable in it’s later versions, and Hytale manages to be more accessible, it would be a clear reason why people would play Hytale rather than Minecraft.
Speaking of Optifine, let’s cover how Mojang handled offering the author of Optifine a job.
Mojang as a company runs incredibly differently, and, they scare away anyone who is actually decent at potentially helping them
Back when the EULA change incident happened over half a decade ago, it was an incredible disaster for everyone. Bukkit got hit with the big DMCA claim with the demand that Minecraft’s server software go open-source for the DMCA to be lifted, networks had to shut down, and, the worst thing to ever happen to Minecraft was the Microsoft buyout with Notch leaving.
Grumm who went to talk to a server owner gave a pretty unprofessional response to this whole situation when conversing with /u/Macguy8. While this wasn’t malicious, you usually don’t see people who you have represent the company speak like this. I don’t have a problem with an employee of a company going around cursing and talking like this on Twitter, but, when representing a large company it seems very off. They weren’t owned at Microsoft at that time (but were about to shortly) but it kind of goes to show their work environment.
The biggest mistake that Mojang has ever made was their failed deal with the Optifine developer. While I found some mixed information on the situation much of the information I found state the reason that they only wanted to integrates parts of Optifine rather than the whole mod. Some explanations for the feud between the Optifine developer and Mojang was that Mojang was upset about how Optifine handed out capes, while, it could have scared away the Optifine developer as Mojang would have legal ownership over those parts of Optifine. The developer either wanted it fully put in, or didn’t want it put into the base-game at all. Mojang very clearly chose to not fully integrate Optifine and the developer of Optifine turned down the opportunity to become a full-time employee at Mojang.
Whatever they did, they turned down an opportunity to make Java Edition more accessible. It’s clear to all of us that their chances of reconciling with the Optifine developer now won’t happen anytime soon as Microsoft sees Java Edition as the “Experimental Edition” of Minecraft.
The DMCA of Bukkit
This was what I believe really went to show Mojang’s character towards things. You won’t see any server not using Bukkit/Spigot/PaperSpigot unless it’s a group of casual friends playing together. Because of this incident you either have to use the Spigot project’s confusing BuildTools.jar or go on an unofficial website like GetBukkit or Yivesmirror.
If you want a full rundown of the situation, check the blog-post here but to summarize, Mojang bought out an open-source project, and, the guy carrying the project DMCA’d it.
Many toxic things happened as a result of this, but, to give you the simple resolution of all of this, would be to make the base Minecraft server jar that no one uses open source.
I disagree that he had the right to DMCA the Bukkit project, but, imagine your free volunteer work being bought out and used by a company that was valued at billions. Especially since Mojang went and horribly handled the EULA situation that led to the creation of Hytale.
Mojang could have made the Minecraft server software open source and fix everything, but, they didn’t. It was a simple solution on their end, that instead had to be resolved by members of their community.
For years, we have seen the community pick up Mojang’s slack without any true compensation. In the lifetime of Minecraft we have seen no Modding API and no real optimizations.
If Hytale/Riot Games treats their community and creators better than Mojang, they will already win
Riot Games has a track record of having good relations with their players, League of Legends has been grown and kept more alive and well than Minecraft has. While Minecraft did have a re-awakening last year, League has never died and has managed to be and stay one of the top Twitch games watched.
I recently quit League of Legends after playing the game for two years, but, over the years I’ve seen that they know how to engage players. They suck at balancing their game but they are good enough to keep people playing.
If you treat your creators well, and, they make things that people want to use, you’ll get people coming to your game to see that creator’s creation. Hytale’s modding API and tools will likely attract the best creators if they are as good as they appear. It will already become more relevant than Minecraft in a matter of mere months.
The most important part of all of this, is that if it will give the top YouTubers more to work with. Making YouTube videos every day is incredibly difficult, and, if Hytale manages to get a couple of extraordinary creations you only need one PrestonPlayz or Stampy Let’s Play to give it a huge boost.
Stampy has already tried Hytale and expressed his approval, so we’ll likely see at least one video or potential series from him.
What really brought players to Minecraft was YouTube. In this article I found from 2014, Minecraft was the most viewed Video Game on all of YouTube. Hytale has many potential creators backing it, established youtubers like CaptainSparklez have shown to be interested.
You only need one person with the next PUBG to get Hytale to blow up
Everyone has heard of PUBG made in the Unreal Engine, and, inspired the creators of the Unreal Engine to rebrand their failing game Fortnite into Fortnite Battle Royale.
Just like how Minecraft Hunger/Survival Games was able to blow up Minecraft, the Arma game’s popularity blew up through DayZ and the battle royale mod, PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale. Currently the Minecraft competitive multiplayer scene is being carried by Hypixel, and, someone in the future will likely be passed the torch to be the Hypixel of Hytale.
Hypixel carries Minecraft’s multiplayer server player count just as DayZ or PUBG carried Arma’s player count. There is a number of reasons why most of the time that they possess more than ten times CubeCraft, HiveMC, and Mineplex’s player count combined, but, it is very clear that without Hypixel or any of these networks, Minecraft would be lacking a huge chunk of concurrent players.
The next big game to be made in Hytale probably won’t be a battle royale, but, we all know that the only limits to a game engine is what is made in it. Whenever a big indie game comes out, there is always a huge influx of people interested in game development going to their favorite game’s game engine. Hytale only needs one big creation for people to pay attention. The next person to make the PUBG, DayZ, or Minecraft Hunger Games of Hytale in the future could be even reading this post right now. You only need one person out of the bunch to make something insane. If Hytale’s creator tools really are as good as it appears, even if the game failed, two years down the line you only need one person to make something insane to get Hytale to pick up traction again. Minecraft has proven that it can revived after being dead for years, even if Hytale failed it could still get someone to make something good enough to make people buy the game.
Summary
Mojang has neglected the true issues of Minecraft for years and relies upon their community to carry everything for them. The game becomes more and more unplayable every update which defeats the purpose of even adding features. We have gotten no modding API either.
Most of the good creators have left, been scared off due to the EULA and other negligence.
If Hytale really has what the blog posts claim, they are more accessible to players, in terms of being able to actually play the game. There is an actual modding API, people can easily join modded servers, and, Riot has a track record of maintaining good relations with their player-base .
Many youtubers are on track to basically do free advertising for the game, and, with the bottomless amount of content that creators will likely provide, youtubers that are forced to make content on the daily for the algorithm have Hytale to constantly give them content for videos to make.
The more youtubers covering Hytale means the more creators, and the more creators means more content for YouTubers to cover.
Most importantly, if all else fails, if the tools are really as good as they appear, you just need one creator to make a game that make Hytale go mainstream, even if it takes years to do so after the official release.
With the trailer obtaining tens of millions of views in early 2019, I ask for you to decide yourself the reason why people were so impulsive to check out the trailer when Minecraft was on it’s death bed before the re-awakening. The demand for the best sandbox game possible already exists, someone just needs to satisfy it.
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