15 years later, the Steam dev behind a failed Minecraft killer won't give up

Before No Man's Sky, there was Cube World. If you haven't heard of it, that's not surprising. The voxel exploration game began development back in 2011 and footage of its blocky paradise stole the internet's collective heart back in 2013. Cube World receded back into obscurity after a controversial Steam alpha in 2019. As I write this, there are a mere 19 people playing Cube World. The game is still in an unfinished alpha state and has a "mostly negative" review score on Steam. It's been years since a new Cube World build was uploaded to the PC platform.

Seven years later, most developers working on a game with zero traction would probably move on. But if you asked Picroma, the studio behind Cube World, they might say they're just getting started.

Picroma consists of two people: Wolfram von Funck, also known as Wollay, and his wife Sarah von Funck. Wollay is the face of Cube, but he's got a scant internet presence. He was most active around 2019, when Cube World's alpha released on Steam. Though these things are commonplace now, at the time, players saw promise in the way Cube World generated dungeons, towns, and NPCs on the fly. The ideas for an endless adventure were all there, but the details that make an RPG sticky — progression, loot, quests — weren't balanced very well.

At first, fans accepted these aspects of Cube World as the growing pains that come with most early-access games. But after a flurry of updates near the launch, Wollay seemingly disappeared. The game languished, and even its most ardent defenders of the game became disgruntled. Since then, no matter how fans feel about Wollay, every single post he makes is like an event for the Cube World fandom.

You see, Wollay has been working on Cube World this entire time. Since the 2019 Steam fiasco, Wollay has added a system that procedurally generates the game's creatures, and he's expanded the customization options. He's added more classes, frogman and lizardman, and a small zoo of new creatures. He doesn't post much, and he doesn't make grand promises. Wollay never links to the game, which is still being sold in an unfinished state on Steam, nor does he encourage people to buy it. Yet even as the world has moved on, Wollay remains obsessed with his creation.

He cares deeply about the way the grass sways, and the way the sun sets. He cares about how lily pads float on a lake, and how the clouds form. In a now-deleted 2019 blog, Wollay said he thought about releasing more updates all the time — he just wasn't sure they were good enough to meet the hype. Besides, the massive attention Cube World got back then wreaked havoc on Wollay's mental health. It got so bad that, at one point, Picroma stopped selling the game altogether.

Wollay has notoriously started over from scratch several times. Each time, he's retained faith in his vision. The most recent rework was in 2023, when he moved Cube World to Unreal Engine 5. It was a big enough deal that Wollay started calling the build Cube World Omega. A fresh start, even though he was still making the same game.

In the middle of May 2026, Wollay shocked fans by sharing a rare new look at Cube World. Beyond UI improvements, tooltips, and inventory upgrades, Wollay announced that he was "working on actual craft stations and shops next!"

Despite Wollay's excitement, the people who still remember Cube World were flabbergasted.

"This game is still being developed?" one X user replied. "I remember wanting this game so bad as a kid."

"Wait this game still exists?" another asked.

"Am I going insane? Other than the UI being floaty and slanted, IT'S STILL THE SAME FUCKING GAME," one Redditor wrote.

The response hasn't been wholly negative. There are fans who are happy to see Cube World is still in development, but are keeping their expectations in check. Others feel that, while the alpha build of Cube World didn't live up to the hype, they still got their money's worth. If it comes out, cool. If not, oh well.

Fifteen years after Picroma revealed Cube World to the world, Minecraft still reigns supreme. Hytale and Lego Fortnite have run with the voxel aesthetic, and reaped the rewards of the look's nostalgia. If Cube World ever does launch in 1.0, the world may not want yet another blocky sandbox by then.

Cube World has been in development so long, though, that an entirely new type of fan has emerged. These fans have convinced themselves that, somewhere amid the many restarts, Wollay overwrote the good version of Cube World. This imagined Cube World only exists within a handful of screenshots and videos. They've never played it, because it was never released. Yet these fans are sure that if Wollay went back, if he would just be willing to revert the game to the time when it was still a fantasy, then Cube World might finally make their dreams come true.