Hey! Simon from Hypixel here, I can chime in with my personal experience and shed some light on our thought process about the timing of the trailer! I didn't check in with the others from the team so I'll probably miss a few points but I'll do my best :)
As a gamer myself, I understand how people could feel like we released the trailer a bit early. I feel the same way towards many games out there and even to Hytale itself! I accept the fact that the hype can't be 100% at all time and that's normal and ok - we are not chasing after it. Reality is that we did 0 press interviews after the trailer and all we did were blog posts to keep you guys in the loop and give us feedback in the process via YouTube/Reddit/etc.I have no doubt that we will get that hype back to 110% before release with a new trailer or something, we have some super exciting stuff to show :D
Truth is, I can tell you that for us it was not a choice anymore to delay the announcement, it became a necessity to get Hytale out there for several reasons. To be honest, we also did not expect the trailer to get that much attention, but that's another topic that I'll cover in a bit!
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Community. Our Hypixel Minecraft server community (about 14mil unique users) knew we were working on a game for 3 or 4 years, but they were starting to lose faith as they got literally no information about it other than "We are working on it".I personally felt like they needed to know what we were working on as they supported us for years but I was also aware of the fact that block based games are not necessarily an easy game to get people excited about, so it had to be as good as we could make it before we could show our community and prove that we care about them a lot. And number wise, Minecraft Java became less and less popular, our peak player count went from about 60k to 25k and we saw such trend happen across the board with other servers so we knew that the community as a whole was moving on as they were getting older or simply changing games to Fortnite, Overwatch, etc. Our community was and still is very important to get Hytale off the ground and our momentum was slowly getting away as our players were getting frustrated with us not giving any information. The perfect timing to release the trailer would have been late 2016 or early 2017, but we were not ready at all and the scope of the game kept getting bigger as well.
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Hiring. Oh boy! Before the trailer, we were getting maybe 3 applications a month? Now we are getting thousands and some applicants have a ton of experience, including major titles, it's crazy. It's a whole new world of opportunity for us to find talented people across the world. This was such an important pain point because people didn't want to risk to leave their stable jobs for a game no one knew if the announcement would go well or not. Some features of Hytale are quite challenging to polish and we need to find the people for it. We also want to find people who are in for the long run, as we will keep updating Hytale for years to come.
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Partnerships. By announcing the game, we wanted to see who would be interested to work with us in the future. For example, who would want to build custom Hytale servers, who could help us with merchandise, who could do our hardware hosting, and the list goes on. Before the trailer, it was really hard to get good the attention or good quotes from companies as they had no scope to know if Hytale would be popular or not. With Hytale, it's important for us to get partners as we believe that our team should remain focused on making a game, not toys or installing hard drives on a server for example.
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Love or Hate. We had no idea at all if you guys would have liked Hytale or not. History has shown times and times again that other than Minecraft, block games are getting constantly hated on so you start to question yourself: Are we making the right game or not? Is this game genre cursed? After working in the dark for years, we had the chance to show the game to a few select people, but other than that it's been really difficult to know if Hytale was something the community would have accepted or rejected it. Knowing this was important because if people didn't like it, we would have made some major changes - but after seeing the major positive reaction it's clear to us that we are on the right path. This means we can invest more time and money towards that vision.
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Console Porting. As we said on the announcement day, we had no immediate plans to make a console version but that we would explore the idea. Having Hytale announced makes this a lot easier to seek the right partners and get them excited (or make it ourselves, we have not decided yet). With such positive reaction and attention on Hytale and the fact that the trailer was released a bit early, it means we can get that project started sooner than later. I don't expect to see a console version for release but at least if we can get started before, that would be nice. I have no info myself about this, we are still working to see what make sense for us as a team.
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Our First Game. Hytale is our first game as a studio and we want to take our time to do it right. To be honest, it's an ambitious project for a first game! We are ready for the challenges ahead and having the community behind us is a huge advantage, all we need to do is work hard and get the community involved as much as we can as we get closer to release. Because it's our first game, it means talking about timelines is very difficult and some features of the game are ending up taking longer than expected.
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Motivation. Team motivation is important and ever since the announcement it has been really motivating to see the community react to our trailer, blog posts, and screenshots. Never the team has been so motivated - it's super fun and the pressure is real. Speaking of blog posts, it helps the team members to show what they have been working on for years, so make sure you cheer them on! :)
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Bigger Than Expected. One thing that no one could have predicted, is the amount of love and support we got with the announcement. Days before the trailer I barely could sleep, doing last minute stuff to make sure the announcement would go well and I was terrified the community would be disappointed. I personally poured a lot of time, anxiety and money into this project so the excitement pre-announcement was mostly fear and panic to be honest haha! When the trailer released, it was quite emotional to see people react to it and see the whole thing grow and grow. The trailer is almost at 50 millions views now (I was expecting 500k-800k!!!), that's unheard of for a new studio and we got ourselves quite the challenge ahead to make sure we don't screw up the unique opportunity we are in. I think players have had their hands burned too many times with unfinished games in the past few years and we don't want to be in a similar situation - because of our unique position we will take our time, at the cost of having a few people upset.
I could go on and on but I have to get back to work! Hopefully, that's enough context to get you guys to understand where we come from :)
I wish I had a magic wand or a way to just pour more money to make all of this go faster - but that's not how it works and this is probably the biggest game we will ever work in our lives so this is very important to us to get it right and work on it for years to come with a healthy community.
Cheers,
Simon
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