Back in 2013, a two-person studio called Picroma posted footage of a blocky, colorful voxel world that made the internet lose its mind. The game was Cube World, and for a brief moment, people genuinely believed it might challenge Minecraft as the definitive sandbox experience. That was 15 years ago. As of May 2026, Cube World is still in an unfinished alpha state on Steam, sitting at a "mostly negative" review score, with just 19 concurrent players recorded on SteamDB.
And yet, Wolfram von Funck, the developer known online as Wollay, is still building it.
Cube World alpha build, 2026
Get up to 80% off games only on GAMES.GG
Exclusive Discounts on Games
The hype that burned too hot
Cube World's origin story is almost mythological at this point. Development started in 2011, footage went viral in 2013, and the game sold through a website that crashed repeatedly under demand. Players saw procedurally generated dungeons, towns, and NPCs, and connected the dots to a potentially infinite RPG adventure. The ideas were genuinely exciting.
The Steam alpha finally dropped in 2019. It did not go well. Progression felt broken, loot was unbalanced, and a core mechanic that reset your items when crossing biomes frustrated players deeply. After a burst of updates following launch, Wollay went quiet. The game stalled. Fans who had championed it for years grew frustrated, then resigned.
Here's the thing: Wollay never actually stopped. He just stopped talking.
What Wollay has actually been doing since 2019
Since the Steam launch, Picroma (which is just Wollay and his wife Sarah von Funck) has been quietly adding to Cube World with almost no public communication. Wollay built a procedural creature generation system. He expanded character customization. He added two new playable races, frogmen and lizardmen, along with a range of new creatures.
The most significant move came in 2023, when Wollay rebuilt the entire game in Unreal Engine 5 and started calling the new build Cube World Omega. A full engine migration, done by essentially one person, on a game that most of the world had already written off.
What most players miss is how much Wollay's development philosophy differs from the standard early-access model. He doesn't post roadmaps. He doesn't hype updates. He cares about how grass sways in the wind and how lily pads sit on water. A 2019 blog post (since deleted) explained that he thought about releasing updates constantly, but held back because he wasn't confident they met the expectations the original hype had created. That hype also took a serious toll on his mental health, bad enough that Picroma stopped selling the game entirely for a period.
Cube World is currently sold on Steam in an unfinished alpha state. Wollay does not link to the Steam page in his own posts and has not encouraged people to buy it.
A rare update in May 2026 and the community's reaction
In mid-May 2026, Wollay shared a new look at Cube World that included UI improvements, tooltip redesigns, and inventory upgrades. He also confirmed he was "working on actual craft stations and shops next," which would be a meaningful step toward the kind of RPG loop the game has always promised but never fully delivered.
The reaction was a mix of disbelief and cautious optimism. On X, one user replied: "This game is still being developed? I remember wanting this game so bad as a kid." Another simply asked: "Wait this game still exists?" On Reddit, a user put it more bluntly: "Am I going insane? Other than the UI being floaty and slanted, IT'S STILL THE SAME FUCKING GAME."
Not everyone was dismissive. A portion of the remaining Cube World community expressed relief that development continues, while keeping expectations grounded. Some players who bought the alpha years ago say they feel they got their money's worth regardless of whether a 1.0 ever ships.
The mythology of the version that never existed
Here's where the Cube World story gets genuinely strange. After so many restarts, a subset of fans has convinced themselves that somewhere along the way, Wollay accidentally overwrote the "good" version of the game. This theoretical build exists only in old screenshots and video clips. Nobody has played it, because it was never released. Reddit threads from this month show fans pleading for Wollay to revert to a 2016-era build, believing that version held the magic the current one lacks.
It's a fascinating kind of collective nostalgia for something that never existed.
Meanwhile, Minecraft still dominates the open world games space, and competitors like Hytale and Lego Fortnite have moved in on the voxel aesthetic with serious resources behind them. If Cube World does eventually reach a full release, it will enter a market that has moved on considerably from 2013.
Wollay keeps building anyway. Whether Cube World Omega ever becomes the game its early footage promised is an open question, but if you want to stay across everything happening in the voxel space and beyond, the Minecraft guides collection is a good place to track how the genre's reigning champion keeps evolving.
