Farewell, Hypixel
It is with sadness and excitement that today I announce I am leaving the Hypixel team to work on some unannounced personal projects. If you’d like to keep up with me and my work, you can:
For almost 3 years I’ve had the privilege of working alongside an incredible team, many of which I consider close personal friends. Working on the Hypixel Server meant trying our best to deliver exceptional games and systems built on top of Minecraft, and every project brought with it a new set of challenges and delights. I’m thankful for the opportunities I was given to learn and grow and execute on some crazy ambitious ideas. It’s impossible to overstate how unbelievably proud I am of the team we built, and the things we created. I’m very sad to leave, it has those end-of-an-era feels, but I couldn’t be more confident in the ability of the team to continue delivering the absolute best Minecraft content. And in future, even more than that.
Many who work in the traditional games industry do not value games or “minigames” built on Minecraft and other platforms. They are wrong. Through ingenuity, hard work, luck and a professional community-first methodology, we crafted scraps into skyscrapers. Together we grew a service that provided genuinely compelling, unique gameplay and systems to ~3 Million Monthly Active Players and over 13 Million total uniques — not just great for a Minecraft server, but great for games in general. We localised into 8 languages, built a moderation team 300+ strong and managed to scale to a 60+ person team under extremely limiting monetisation restrictions. By tearing apart a singleplayer RPG and rebuilding it in our own image on our own terms, we created something greater than the sum of its parts — in metrics, in money, in quality, and most important of all, in community.
To the entrenched who have spent a decade trading naivety and creative risk-taking for Known Truths and Hard Experience about the industry they work in, New is scary. Nobody wants to be ignorant, so we write off New as “just a trend”. To the people who don’t understand why Battle Royale games are suddenly popular, why kids watch streamers, why China is the new frontier or why millions of people would choose to log in to the same Minecraft server every month, I say this: Learn, or lose. Because the future isn’t entitled to us just because we were here first, and the world is full of damn smart kids who can see things our eyes have been trained to ignore.
Hypixel has been a huge part of my life since I joined, and many of my fondest memories come from the smart, funny, and incredibly passionate server community. To have positively impacted the lives of so many players has been a true joy. A few healthy mistakes aside, I’m very happy with how far things have come in these few short, sweet years, and I hope you feel the same. Thank you all for the support. And, of course, the memes.
Though we achieved too much to list, some of my highlights include:
- Designing and launching the Daily Rewards system, my first major project
- Launching the Prototype Lobby in early 2017, including helping pitch and create the early versions of Bed Wars
- Bringing Murder Mystery from v0.1 to full release as one of the most consistently popular games through 2017
- Talking with creators on YouTube and elsewhere, and using that feedback to deploy major updates to our YT Rank features
- Releasing Loot Chests and the MVP++ Rank on the Hypixel Store, which I still feel offer a great value proposition
- Integrating news in-game via books, and bringing the Facebook page to 1 Million likes and the main Twitter to 200k+ followers
- Earning 4 Guinness World Records after breaking our own records for CCU, MAU, Total Uniques and revenue. Hypixel today remains the most popular independent server for any video game!
The Hypixel Team and the relationships formed in my time here will always be a significant part of my life, and though I’m sad to leave, I’m excited to cheer them on from the sidelines. Garnet out!
