Daemin i believe in you 😭🙏

Soon after a game is cancelled or a studio shuts down, we get a lot of comments and emails from fans saying "You should buy this IP!" Then, as months go by, those comments turn into "Why didn't you buy it? You have the money!" The reality is, in my experience at least, the IP holders often have absolutely no interest in selling and when they do, the asking price is absurd... It's becoming a more common topic these days, because so many games are being cancelled or shut down, so I just wanted to share my personal experience. Plenty of companies do try to buy or at least license game IPs to keep them alive. But...if the IP holder doesn't want to play ball...then there isn't much anyone can really do :/

Update 6 went well! Player count is going up even without any new content, and much of that is because the mod browser is easy to use and modders have new tools to play with! Things are looking really good from here. Better than I predicted! Eli listed what is coming to the mod browser in the next few days below, and that list is just the start. We are still in ship fast, break things, fix later mode, and that is on purpose! Now, a note about some modders using AI thumbnail art, since it has been my whole timeline for three days. Just so everyone understands, I am not a fan of AI art at all, and I would rather it wasn't there. I also do not want to turn the browser into a police force. Every layer of moderation either slows down mods getting approved or lands on my team as overhead, and none of it fixes next year, when real and generated will be basically impossible to tell apart. If we take an automated solution, people will just route around the checks. It sounds simple to just moderate. It isn't, and we aren't going to staff a thumbnail review across hundreds of thousands of mods. That said, we have already communicated with our partners to explore solutions. I'm not happy with the current state of things, and everyone is aware. Please be patient. I also want to be clear about what you actually see on social media. A lot of the screenshots going around use sort filters that show way more slop than the default pages do. Just try it yourself: open the main mod page, and there is barely any (if any?). In the meantime, modders, please use screenshots for thumbnails. If you need art, work with an artist, or make bad art yourself and fix it later. Honestly, that is still better than gen art and up your chances of getting featured by us. Longer term, players will help a lot with this. Favorites, ratings, you vote with what you like. The creator rewards we have talked about should also let modders afford artists, and we will promote the artists who can help them. On our side, Hytale does not ship generative AI art and never will. Not a single pixel. I hope modders make the same choice. We are not going to hire hundreds of people to fight an impossible fight, but we hope our modders understand how important art and artists are. We are betting players reward the people who choose the right path. One last thing. I was trying to spend the weekend with my kids, something I barely did this past year because of Hytale, and it was a bit disappointing to watch some of the loud voices go full panic when it had barely been a weekend. You know me by now. I always come back with a solution. Give us a bit of room to work, and bring suggestions instead of demanding an answer on a Saturday. I saved Hytale for the passion and fun of it, and I want to keep it that way.

new players are gonna get a VERY BAD impression of Hytale if they log on for the first time and are faced with walls of blatant AI slop art on the mod browser and server browser just saying ⚠️