News - Hytale won't be on Steam right away, as its developers want to avoid overemphasizing negative reviews from players who aren't as well informed yet.

The revived Minecrafty survivabuilder Hytale has received a fresh early-access release date of January 13th, the other week. However, the team behind it has now confirmed you shouldn’t expect to see it hit Steam at that point, with the game's executive director not seeing the need to bother Valve's pipe-laden door yet and keen to avoid early access being drowned in negative reviews. This comes from the first post addressing frequently asked questions that Hytale's current developers have issued since securing the rights to it from Riot. Right off the bat, executive director Patrick 'Lyall' Derbic addressed whether the game would be hitting the Steam platform. "No, not initially," he wrote. "We want to spend our time in early access working with the community and improving the game, rather than overemphasizing negative reviews from players who aren't as well-informed yet about what we are doing. Steam is a great marketing tool, but one that we might never need. This doesn't mean we will never be on Steam — just that we do not yet see the necessity." On the one hand, working with a more concentrated group of players you can grill for in-depth thoughts on the game early on sounds like a good plan, especially since the team has been clear that what you’ll get on day one will be quite rough around the edges and have plenty of room to grow. On the other hand, there's perhaps an argument that initially ducking criticism from people outside of those likely already keen on Hytale could potentially lead to blind spots in terms of helping it appeal to a wider audience down the line. In any case, I'm not a game developer and certainly appreciate the tough task any game nowadays faces in carving out a reputation for itself that can attract eyeballs and avoid being buried amid the massive avalanche of games constantly competing for players' hours. The rest of the FAQ post shows Derbic acknowledging things like the fact the team is working on region-specific pricing for a limited number of countries to start with, with $20 being the base price worldwide for now. Extra cosmetics will be added, but there will be no pay-to-win offerings as far as monetization goes. Finally, pets, animal taming, and fishing are all in the works, but won't be there in January. The full post is also worth reading if you're unsure about the different editions of Hytale being sold at launch. Derbic and the team have also shared the hardware specs you'll need to meet to run the sandbox comfortably on your machine.