Closure Announcement

The following post has been written by our founder Callum, on behalf of the owners of NG - Callum & Dries.

Hi everyone,

It brings us great sadness to announce this to everyone. On the 28th of June 2026, NetherGames will close forever.

A bit of history about NetherGames

NetherGames first started on January 18th, 2016. For my 11th birthday, I convinced my parents to pay for a hosting provider for a year to run my own server, as I've always loved playing on Minecraft servers and it was a dream to run my own. NetherGames initially started as a small server with friends, running exclusively on a mess of public plugins downloaded from PocketMine forums. Eventually my friends moved on, but I kept running the server. In the early days I had to advertise on bigger servers to get people to join NetherGames, and somehow it worked to the point where we got a player count that actually stayed on the server when I disconnected. The server was first called NetherPvP, as our hosting provider offered free subdomains under anything.nether.co, but they wouldn’t let me choose any subdomain that implied that the server owned the full domain e.g play.nether.co, but eventually I was able to get pvp.nether.co approved, so I named the server "NetherPvP". Eventually we moved on from just PvP so the server renamed to NetherGames and we eventually bought our own domain.

The early days of NetherGames was a lot of trial and error. Every few months our lobby would get completely griefed by a rogue person we gave OP permissions to and we'd have to actively rebuild it whilst there were hundreds of players using the lobby (for some reason we never considered backing up the world files).

Eventually in 2017 came the Better Together update. This forced all players to login with Xbox, and sadly this killed the player counts for many servers, NetherGames included. So I found another server called GameCraftPE, which was run by Dries at the time, who had also been struggling with player counts from the new update. We decided to merge the servers together under the NetherGames brand, and NetherGames as you know it today wouldn't exist without him. Dries' technical expertise allowed us to move away from public plugins and build a great Minecraft server fully in-house.

In 2020 & 2021, NetherGames took off whilst everyone was home during the pandemic. Our server experienced incredible growth and we hit a record concurrent player count of 3,314 players! During this time, we had to scale NetherGames incredibly and bring on a lot of new staff to manage our sudden popularity.

Why we're closing the server

It hasn't been easy developing and managing a Minecraft Bedrock server. When Microsoft bought Mojang, it became their mission to make it as difficult as possible for non-featured servers to exist. Over the years, Mojang has deliberately cut off non-featured servers from technical information they once provided freely, and despite repeated assurances that this access would be restored, it never was. This has created an uneven playing field that has only gotten harder to compete on, and keeping NetherGames updated to the latest versions has become an increasingly resource intensive battle we were never going to win. We did have a meeting with Microsoft in 2024 about the potential of becoming a featured server, but unfortunately we were eventually ghosted by our contact.

Beyond the technical challenges, there's a more personal side to this decision. Dries and I have both grown up alongside this server for nearly a decade of our lives. This year Dries finishes university, and we're both at a point where we're ready to close this chapter and move on to what comes next. It's not a decision we made lightly, and it took us a long time to finally make it.

Some honourable mentions

NetherGames wouldn't have been what it was without the people behind it. These are just a few of them:

• Lazer - An early Admin who helped shape the server and grow our community from the ground up
• Keith - For helping out in the early days
• Matcracker - For massively helping our transition to in house development
• Tobias - A brilliant developer and product manager who modernised our infrastructure and made it possible for us to handle the growth we saw in 2020/2021
• Larry - An incredibly skilled developer who worked on many of the MMO games our players loved
• Casper - Built an extensive web portal that let players stay connected to NetherGames off the server. Casper has since gone on to build Fluxer (fluxer.app), an open source privacy focused Discord alternative worth checking out.
• Heather & Sequoia - For supporting NetherGames financially when we needed it most, and Heather for being a wonderful community manager throughout her time with us

There are so many more people we have to thank for helping NetherGames along its journey. To the dedicated staff who volunteered their time purely out of passion; our community developers who kept the technical side alive; our partners and YouTubers who helped grow our community; our Titan subscribers, server boosters, and store customers who supported us financially over the years - and most importantly, to every single player who made NetherGames the server it was. We could not have done it without any of you.

What will happen in the remaining months?

We want to make sure our final weeks do justice to everything NetherGames has been. We've already opened a guest book in the lobby where you can leave a message about what the server has meant to you and this will be published permanently on our website once the server closes. We'll also be announcing more closing events soon as we approach the end date.

Factions & Skyblock will reset this week and will have a final season running until the server closure.

So, will NetherGames be dead? Not entirely. When the server closes, we'll be open sourcing as many of our games we can. That means anyone will be able to host their own matches, run their own events, and keep playing their favourite NetherGames games with friends long after the server is gone. We want NetherGames to live on in whatever form it can.

More details on how to access everything will be announced closer to the closure.

If you have a Titan subscription that extends past the 28th of June 2026, you'll receive a refund for any unused time. We'll be publishing a support article with full details on this within the coming weeks. We'll also be adding a notice to the store so anyone purchasing a rank is aware of the closure.

Thank you everyone so much for the support along this journey. — Callum & Dries