For a while, Mineplex was the biggest Minecraft server in the world, and it had the certificate to prove it. Then one day in May 2023 the lights went out, with no event, no countdown and no goodbye from the people who owned it. Three years later, it was back.
Mineplex launched in 2013, created by Gregory Bylos and Jarred van de Voort. Its pitch was custom minigames at a time when vanilla Minecraft had almost nothing structured to do with friends. Early games included Champions, MineStrike and Survival Games, each with its own custom maps.
The record
The network grew fast. YouTuber CaptainSparklez joined the ownership team and promoted the server heavily, and by January 2015 Mineplex was pulling crowds no Minecraft server had seen before.
On January 28, 2015, Guinness World Records recognized Mineplex for 34,434 players online at the same time, the most ever recorded on a Minecraft server up to then.
The record did not last. Hypixel overtook it, and Guinness's current entry for most popular Minecraft server network credits Hypixel with 64,533 players in July 2017. But Mineplex stayed huge. Wikipedia reports that in 2016 it had millions of unique players every month, with around 20,000 online at its peak at any given time. It also ran on Bedrock Edition, which would matter later.
The long slide
After 2016, the numbers drifted down. Wikipedia points to rising competition, technical trouble with lag and exploits, and players' complaints about monetization. After 2020, updates slowed. During the Java server's decline, the Bedrock side kept averaging more than 4,000 players at a time.
Two servers in one
Mineplex was never just a Java network. Its Bedrock counterpart served phone and console players, and in the later years it carried a big part of the crowd while the Java side shrank.
The day it went dark
On May 11, 2023, Mineplex's website and game servers went offline without warning. At first, nobody panicked; outages had happened before. Days passed. Then a Discord post from an administrator named dean made it official.
Unfortunately I have been given the burden of informing you that this will be forever.dean, Mineplex administrator, on the Mineplex Discord, May 2023, as reported by Gameranx
In the same message, dean asked the community not to take it out on the staff, writing that they had worked for the company but had not owned it or made the decisions that led there. Gameranx noted that the specific reason for the shutdown was never made public, and the owners gave no farewell.
For a server that had held a world record, the ending was strangely quiet. It came just over ten years after launch. Players who had grown up on Super Smash Mobs and Cake Wars lost access to their ranks and cosmetics overnight, and the staff lost a community they had helped run, without a final event or a last day to log in.
The rescue attempts
The quiet did not last long. In late May 2023, former Mineplex administrator and streamer Sam Dawahare, known as Samito, took over ownership through Mineplex Studios LLC. Reports differ on whether it was May 26 or May 27.
Samito's plan was bigger than a restart. His team built the Mineplex Studio, a development platform meant to let other people create their own minigames on the network. According to Wikipedia, teams building on the Studio paid $15 a month and received a 35% share of revenue. It was a bet that Mineplex's future was as a platform for creators, not just a place to play.
A closed beta opened on August 9, 2024, with access behind a paywall. Another closed beta followed on May 2, 2025, with both Java and Bedrock players and the classic minigames back in rotation.
It was not the comeback most old players wanted. On March 7, 2026, Samito handed control of Mineplex to a new owner named James. Wikipedia reports he explained the move as the project's infrastructure focus not matching what long-time players expected.
The return
On June 12, 2026, Mineplex reopened to the public on Java Edition. The revived server leaned hard into nostalgia: the classic hub, the classic cosmetics, and the games people remembered.
Mineplex launches with custom minigames.
A Guinness World Record: 34,434 players at once.
Millions of unique players a month, around 20,000 online at peak.
The website and servers go dark without warning.
An admin confirms the closure; days later, Samito takes ownership.
A paid closed beta opens.
A new closed beta brings Java and Bedrock players back together.
Samito hands control to a new owner, James.
Mineplex relaunches to the public on Java Edition.
Today the official site lists the operator as Revived Network LTD and supports Java, Bedrock and console players. The game list reads like 2015: Champions, Survival Games, Super Smash Mobs, MineStrike, Block Hunt, Cake Wars, Turf Wars, Speed Builders, The Bridges, Clans and more. Its news feed in the summer of 2026 has been patch notes and tournaments, the ordinary rhythm of a server that is simply open again.
Here's how it looks right now, by our own count:
Live from our pinger · checked 1 min ago
Whether the second life lasts longer than the first is the open question. For now, the maps are back, and the lobby is open. If you grew up on this kind of server, our minigames server list has the rest of the family.
Want to see it yourself?
Sources
- Wikipedia: Mineplex
- Gameranx: Minecraft Server Mineplex Shuts Down After A Decade (May 17, 2023)
- Guinness World Records: Most popular Minecraft server network
- Mineplex (official site)
- Mineplex Wiki (Fandom): Mineplex
Player counts, votes and uptime on this page are live from our own checks. Everything else comes from the sources above. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
