State of The Hive: Fall 2024

At the start of 2024, The Hive publicly switched gears. After our successful Universal Studios Live Event at the end of 2023, we're now focusing more than ever on fully in-house persistent content: from major minigame releases, to our biggest project yet in the form of a brand new SkyBlock/MMO Featured Server.

In the 3 sections below, we'll update you on the state of our minigame server, a deeper dive in the upcoming Region Agnostic changes and our thoughts on our portfolio of games, and a progress update on SkyBlock Horizons.

The Hive Minigame Server

Back in April, we released the long-awaited BedWars minigame. We’re incredibly happy with how this game has been received, it quickly became the most played game on the entire network. Since then, we followed this with both smaller patches as well as a bigger end-of-summer update.

Our minigame team is currently working on Season 2, which will be our first fully themed season. This season will bring new gameplay, items, maps, challenges, and cosmetics. Additionally, Season 2 will launch with a special limited-time game mode that will have you playing BedWars in a completely new way.

SkyWars received various updates this year, both the core (Lucky) gamemode and the introduction of SkyWars: Classic, a mode that is closer to the original concept of SkyWars games in Minecraft. As SkyWars is now at level 100, it will be receiving prestige support after enough time has passed since the level update.

As summer has ended, we’ve started focusing more on smaller updates, allowing us to update many of our games in various ways. You can check all of these out on our updates website. We have more of these planned for the coming months; this also includes new maps.

Despite expanding our team, we have a good amount of our creative resources committed to our upcoming MMO/SkyBlock server. As we'd rather use these remaining resources on persistent game updates, we’re not going all-out on our seasonal events for the remainder of this year. We still have our Halloween and Winter themed updates as usual, including existing and brand-new seasonal maps.

On top of the many updates that we share on our various channels, we have a team of backend- and internals-developers that mainly work on the areas of the server invisible to you as a player. This includes the more obvious work of keeping our server compatible with the latest (usually monthly) Minecraft updates, but also maintaining things like leaderboards, our various services surrounding statistics/leaderboards, entitlements (what you own) and global state, to the core infrastructure that allocates game and custom servers. All of this is vital to a well-running network and is the full-time job of various teams, but often is too technical (or not interesting) to outside readers.

Update on Region Agnostic and Game Availability

We’re currently in the process of updating core parts of our network to get ready to enable what we call “Region Agnostic”. We’ve mentioned this in the past, but this has been a slow journey as we’re committed to protecting both the stability of our regions as well as providing the correct player experience.

Our core goal with Region Agnostic is allowing players to play “on” their own region, whilst being able to queue into games on other regions without a full switch. This logic will be decided per game queue: if we can reasonably matchmake with players exclusively in the same region, this will always be the default outcome. However, we see a vast number of players join relatively empty regions during off-peak hours, try and play a game with low(er) player count, and leave after a few minutes. With Region Agnostic, we’ll find these players a match of the game they want to play, prioritizing the best possible latency. As you’ll be using our enterprise-grade routing, rather than relying on your own Internet Provider, most players will have a better experience using Region Agnostic matchmaking rather than switching regions directly.

Player happiness is vital to us as we make this change. We will start out with the least played games, which benefit the most from this change, and are often not PvP games and thus less latency driven. Even if latency does affect the experience, players being able to use Platform Based Matchmaking more often should still provide a net positive in those scenarios.

Players will be able to opt-out of Region Agnostic but should expect severely impacted queue times if they choose to do so. We’ll provide in-game messaging as this feature is launched and enabled.

Over the years, we’ve added more and more games without removing any non-LTM games. A number of our games are struggling to fill lobbies, especially during off-peak and outside of holiday seasons. For now, we will monitor the impact of Region Agnostic queues as they release and evaluate the health of these games. If despite this these games continue to struggle, we might make the decision to vault them: however, this won't be until 2025 at the earliest.

SkyBlock: Horizons Progress Update

Our upcoming SkyBlock/MMO server, SkyBlock: Horizons, is our studios biggest undertaking since the initial release of our minigame server back in 2018.

This new Featured Server entry, which will be ran almost entirely separately from our minigame network, is built on an updated tech stack. Our minigame server runs on a custom “Minecraft compatible” server platform: for the SkyBlock server, our server internals team has been hard at work on a significantly improved version of this. This has also allowed us to make bigger and more impactful changes, without threatening the stability of our minigame network. Over time, certain improvements, new features and other changes may also make their way back to our minigame network codebase.

It’s important for this type of server to feel alive and bring a sense of community and collaboration: both in how the world feels, the interaction with NPCs, mobs and other characters, but also the interaction with other players. We’ve made the decision to host the server exclusively in a North America – East region, which provides a balanced experience for most of the Bedrock multiplayer player base. As this type of server is more PvE rather than PvP, we’re of the opinion that the benefits far outweigh the downsides of this.

The world of SkyBlock: Horizons is vast. A huge open world awaits you, containing many unique mobs, resources, towns, settlements, and quest lines. As of writing this post, the main world contains over 140,000 chunks and takes 15 minutes to run from one side to the other - you'll definitely want to use the various modes of travel available to you.

With a huge open world, personal islands, skill levels (in addition to a global level), main quest line, side quests, and so much more, Horizons will be a true Minecraft MMO.

We've made excellent progress in world- and terrain building, visual and audio design, the new code base, and many other areas of the experience. That said, it’s vital that the launch-day experience is one that feels right, and something that we’re proud of and know that players will have a good experience with. Additionally, some legal, operational and monetization-based steps are still in progress, some of which depend on external parties.

With that in mind, we are currently targeting for a full release during the Summer of 2025. Whilst there's a lot we can't share just yet for various reasons, we're excited to showcase a lot more closer to release.

Closing Thoughts

In a time in which layoffs and other reductions in team sizes are common in our industry, we’ve continued to expand our team in a slow-but-steady way to deliver the content our players desire whilst providing a sustainable work environment to our employees and contractors.

We’re very happy with the state of the server and Minecraft in general; after a relatively challenging post-lockdown (gaming) world, we’ve continued to improve our internal processes to get to a better rhythm in creating and releasing content. We know our players want more – and we’re constantly working on finding ways to deliver on just that.

From all of us at The Hive, thanks for playing and stay tuned!