Fluxty

Hytale is offering an unprecedented level of fairness to builders compared to the rest of the UGC space today. This is stuff I only thought was possible in my wildest dreams, and I want to do everything I can to help make Hytale the greatest place for people to make and play games. It's time to build on Hytale. And because our community loves and misses our games, we're starting there. To everyone from our MC communities: Hytale is enabling us to reimagine everything we've built over the past decade. It's all coming back, and it's going to be bigger and better than ever, in Hytale.🫡

@sama It's entirely possible for people to prefer a democratically elected government while sometimes democratically siding with unelected private companies. After all, the people appointed by the democratically elected government are also unelected.

Three general things from this AMA: 1. There is more open debate than I thought ther ewould be, at least in this part of Twitter, about whether we should prefer a democratically elected government or unelected private companies to have more power. I guess this is something people disagree on, but…I don’t. This seems like an important area for more discussion. 2. I think the is a question behind a lot of the questions but I haven’t seen quite articulated: What happens if the government tries to nationalize OpenAI or other AI efforts? I obviously don’t know; I have thought about it of course (it has seemed to me for a long time it might be be better if building AGI were a government project) but it doesn’t seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important. 3. People take their safety (in the national security sense) more for granted than I realized, which I think is a good thing on balance but I don’t think shows enough respect to the tremendous work it takes for that to happen. Also, I am on the whole very grateful for the level of reasonable and good-faith engagement here. It was not what I expected.

I'd like to answer questions about our work with the DoW and our thinking over the past few days. Please AMA.

Haven't posted art in a while so here's BROWT!!

I see, I understand better now. This is anthropocentrism but technically accurate. Since "AI art" is an oxymoron, people use the derogatory "slop" to describe it instead. I'm not sure I totally agree, there is still a human designer prompting the AI with emotion and intent. You have a very conservative interpretation, similar to when painters said photographers aren't artists because they're simply taking pictures of the environment. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. The demand for art will be supplied by whoever makes the best cost-adjusted art (cheap imitation or not). You may be right and it'll never be good enough to displace humans permanently.

@Fluxty @TheShabunga @BarleyTheBurr First, there’s no such thing as AI art. Second, yes, it is a cheap imitation of art. Because art is the expression of feelings, and machines don’t do that. They can notice and reproduce patterns but they cannot feel.

“What are your thoughts on AI?” Well…

@TibayAron @TheShabunga @BarleyTheBurr Hey, genuinely curious - why do so many people have this view that AI art is a cheap imitation? And I'm assuming you mean that it is a cheap imitation of human art?

@TheShabunga @BarleyTheBurr First, you can't get the same quality with any AI, you get a cheap imitation. Second, those 700$ and 7 months are overexaggerated by very very far. Nonetheless, if you pay 9$ for shit quality, you get shit quality. If you prefer it that is on you

@retracjnarat2 @Simon_Hypixel Good morning Tazza! If you need help understanding my response, you can paste it into your favorite AI chat bot for a full breakdown. P.S. We're all just trying to help make Hytale the best game possible. There's no need for all the hostility.

@Fluxty @Simon_Hypixel You genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about. Your response reads like words strung together to sound intelligent, but it comes across as uninformed.

Roblox prioritizing shareholders over creators is not surprising at all; they are a public company, and that's their duty. If you want to understand the direction the company is heading, don’t look at the marketing aimed at creators. Read how they talk to investors vs how they talk to developers and artists. In investor communications, the focus is on scalability, efficiency, margins, and AI-driven growth. In creator-facing messaging, the word “AI” is often avoided entirely, replaced with vague buzzwords like “real-time dreaming” or “4D.” That disconnect is calculated. The strategy is clear, though: leverage developer and artist content to train their own AI labs and reduce dependence on human-created UGC over time. Whether that future arrives in 2 years or 10, the direction is obvious. At the end of the day, platforms under investor pressure look for ways to scale content creation without scaling payouts. It’s visible in earnings calls, investor decks, hiring patterns, and the language used, depending on the audience. Creators should pay attention because the story told to shareholders contrasts with the one told to them. What do I know? I've been on both sides: as a successful UGC creator and now as a UGC game/platform. I met with many of the big companies you can think of and was part of many discussions on monetization and business strategy for those businesses. I know this space from the core; I started from absolutely nothing and worked through every aspect of the business. But hey, that's just my personal opinion ;)

Fair points, I deeply respect and relate to your passion. Hytale was essentially owned by Tencent at one point, so I can appreciate that you have firsthand experience with your baby being in the corporate machine. But I think a REALLY important factor here is that you're building a UGC platform and creators need players/viewers. If you're content with reaching i.e. Stardew Valley level for profitability and not scaling to i.e. Roblox level that doesn't seem to serve creators? Also, Roblox is not really burning money. They're just taking their massive (gross) profits and reinvesting it into R&D, data centers, etc. They could be profitable ~tomorrow if they stopped trying to grow. They are intentionally not profitable.

Hytale is not an entrepreneur's project; it's a game dev project. Profits mean you can weather the bad times and make future investments without needing loans or investors' money that takes control over the years. Or worse for the players, go IPO. In the gaming industry, it's critical. Look at great games out there like Stardew and others, fantastic profitable businesses, no corporate crap getting in the way for the sake of the "entrepreneurial mindset" that you are talking about here. I would rather have a profitable company with a good game and team than a high-rev, 3000+-person company that is always burning cash and min/maxing everything, at the expense of players.

@Simon_Hypixel Wait, why would you already have profits? Roblox doesn't have profits because they reinvest in growth. Roblox also has over a billion in FCF. They booked nearly $7B in Robux last year. Any entrepreneur in their right mind would take their cash flow over an accounting profit.

I got one thing that Roblox never had: profits

I think this is a bit TOO cynical. Roblox pays their employees over $1B a year in stock based compensation - they're diluting their shareholders and shareholders aren't particularly happy about that. If anything, Roblox is prioritizing their engineers/employees over the other stakeholders (creators, owners), which is much less black/white ethically.

@VitalikButerin I think a potential issue with this idea is that it introduces insider trading. Even if you hand-pick the initial creator set, it's difficult to prevent non-public coordination of the members and the DAO subsequently devolving into a cabal.

How I would do creator coins We've seen about 10 years of people trying to do content incentivization in crypto, from early-stage platforms like Bihu and Steemit, to BitClout in 2021, to Zora, to tipping features inside of decentralized social, and more. So far, I think we have not been very successful, and I think this is because the problem is fundamentally hard. First, my view of what the problem is. A major difference between doing "creator incentives" in the 00s vs doing them today, is that in the 00s, a primary problem was having not enough content at all. In the 20s, there's plenty of content, AI can generate an entire metaverse full of it for like $10. The problem is quality. And so your goal is not *incentivizing content*, it's *surfacing good content*. Personally, I think that the most successful example of creator incentives we've seen is Substack. To see why, take a look at the top 10: substack.com/leaderboard/te… substack.com/leaderboard/cu… substack.com/leaderboard/wo… Now, you may disagree with many of these authors. But I have no doubt that: 1. They are on the whole high quality, and contribute positively to the discussion 2. They are mostly people who would not have been elevated without Substack's presence So Substack is genuinely surfacing high quality and pluralism. Now, we can compare to creator coin projects. I don't want to pick on a single one, because I think there's a failure mode of the entire category. For example: Top Zora creator coins: coingecko.com/en/categories/… BitClout: businessofbusiness.com/articles/insid… Basically, the top 10 are people who already have very high social status, and who are often impressive but primarily for reasons other than the content they create. At the core, Substack is a simple subscription service: you pay $N per month, and you get to see the person's articles. But a big part of Substack's success is that they did not just set the mechanism and forget. Their launch process was very hands-on, deliberately seeding the platform with high-quality creators, based on a very particular vision of what kind of high-quality intellectual environment they wanted to foster, including giving selected people revenue guarantees. So now, let's get to one idea that I think could work (of course, coming up with new ideas is inherently a more speculative project than criticizing existing ones, and more prone to error). Create a DAO, that is *not* token-based. Instead, the inspiration should be Protocol Guild: there are N members, and they can (anonymously) vote new members in and out. If N gets above ~200, consider auto-splitting it. Importantly, do _not_ try to make the DAO universal or even industry-wide. Instead, embrace the opinionatedness. Be okay with having a dominant type of content (long-form writing, music, short-form video, long-form video, fiction, educational...), and be okay with having a dominant style (eg. country or region of origin, political viewpoint, if within crypto which projects you're most friendly to...). Hand-pick the initial membership set, in order to maximize its alignment with the desired style. The goal is to have a group that is larger than one creator and can accumulate a public brand and collectively bargain to seek revenue opportunities, but at the same time small enough that internal governance is tractable. Now, here is where the tokens come in. In general, one of my hypotheses this decade is that a large portion of effective governance mechanisms will all have the form factor of "large number of people and bots participating in a prediction market, with the output oracle being a diverse set of people optimized for mission alignment and capture resistance". In this case, what we do is: anyone can become a creator and create a creator coin, and then, if they get admitted to a creator DAO, a portion of their proceeds from the DAO are used to burn their creator coins. This way, the token speculators are NOT participating in a recursive-speculation attention game backed only by itself. Instead, they are specifically being predictors of what new creators the high-value creator DAOs will be willing to accept. At the same time, they also provide a valuable service to the creator DAOs: they are helping surface promising creators for the DAOs to choose from. So the ultimate decider of who rises and falls is not speculators, but high-value content creators (we make the assumption that good creators are also good judges of quality, which seems often true). Individual speculators can stay in the game and thrive to the extent that they do a good job of predicting the creator DAOs' actions.

@VitalikButerin Progress DVT😀

In these five years, the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of mild austerity, in order to be able to simultaneously meet two goals: 1. Deliver on an aggressive roadmap that ensures Ethereum's status as a performant and scalable world computer that does not compromise on robustness, sustainability and decentralization. 2. Ensures the Ethereum Foundation's own ability to sustain into the long term, and protect Ethereum's core mission and goals, including both the core blockchain layer as well as users' ability to access and use the chain with self-sovereignty, security and privacy. To this end, my own share of the austerity is that I am personally taking on responsibilities that might in another time have been "special projects" of the EF. Specifically, we are seeking the existence of an open-source, secure and verifiable full stack of software and hardware that can protect both our personal lives and our public environments ( see vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/0… ). This includes applications such as finance, communication and governance, blockchains, operating systems, secure hardware, biotech (including both personal and public health), and more. If you have seen the Vensa announcement (seeking to make open silicon a commercially viable reality at least for security-critical applications), the ucritter.com including recent versions with built in ZK + FHE + differential-privacy features, the air quality work, my donations to encrypted messaging apps, my own enthusiasm and use for privacy-preserving, walkaway-test-friendly and local-first software (including operating systems), then you know the general spirit of what I am planning to support. For this reason I have just withdrawn 16,384 ETH, which will be deployed toward these goals over the next few years. I am also exploring secure decentralized staking options that will allow even more capital from staking rewards to be put toward these goals in the long term. Ethereum itself is an indispensable part of the "full-stack openness and verifiability" vision. The Ethereum Foundation will continue with a steadfast focus on developing Ethereum, with that goal in mind. "Ethereum everywhere" is nice, but the primary priority is "Ethereum for people who need it". Not corposlop, but self-sovereignty, and the baseline infrastructure that enables cooperation without domination. In a world where many people's default mindset is that we need to race to become a big strong bully, because otherwise the existing big strong bullies will eat you first, this is the needed alternative. It will involve much more than technology to succeed, but the technical layer is something which is in our control to make happen. The tools to ensure your, and your community's, autonomy and safety, as a basic right that belongs to everyone. Open not in a bullshit "open means everyone has the right to buy it from us and use our API for $200/month" way, but actually open, and secure and verifiable so that you know that your technology is working for you.

@Simon_Hypixel Not as exciting as some others, but I got weapon/tool stats showing up in items! (Including in workbench & player inventories, not just a separate UI)

Hytale modders! Show me screenshots/videos of your creations in the replies!

@Windows @Simon_Hypixel Galaxy brain intern

@Simon_Hypixel all credit where it’s due 🫡

legendary seed find

@DevSlashNulled Just finished our Survival server w/ anti-spawn camping setup @ play.despawn.io :) Next step is to slowly evolve into full SMP!

Finally getting some time to wind down, catch up with the community, how's everyone enjoying it? What have y'all been upto in Hytale 👀

@slikey @DevSlashNulled It's really unbelievable what you guys have pulled off.

57 days ago (Nov 17, 2025), Hytale was saved. Two months ago it was still cancelled. Today, we’re putting a playable build in your hands. As the technical director I want to spotlight 2 of ~50 team members making this happen - my left and right hand: • @DevSlashNulled: “Player googles Hytale” -> “Game installs & updates” • @ZeroErrors: engine architecture; led the modernization + cleanup + stability They’re backed by an incredible team, and I hope to highlight every single one in the near future. This isn’t a finish line - it’s the starting line.

Hytale is less than 3 hours away 3 hours til' we can spend hundreds of hours doing this

Despawn.io will be the best place to play Hytale multiplayer on launch week.

We did it. Hytale is saved. We have acquired Hytale from Riot Games.

@MoonOverlord I'm more skeptical. Those historic games had 10x+ the concurrency at launch. Arc Raiders is a bit under where Marvel Rivals was. Further, this genre is very vulnerable to cheaters and player burnout. Hard for extraction shooters to get enough retention to achieve GOAT status.

Kinda feels like Arc Raiders might be a Fortnite moment You get a new game every 5 or so years that stands the test of time WOW, League, Minecraft / Roblox, Fortnite etc

Such a broad statement about tokens is inaccurate imo. There are governance tokens which can programmatically guarantee dividends and arguably confer better voting rights than traditional equities. Specifically, governance tokens that give holders control of the treasury/revenue management do this.