Rebranding AGAIN?! Yup, it’s true. For the final time, TOPIA has officially rebranded to HYTOPIA.
In an unexpected update, members of the community noticed a change to the official social media profiles for TOPIA, originally @TOPIAgg, was updated to @HYTOPIAgg.
This was followed up by the official announcement via Discord and Twitter that TOPIA has officially rebranded to HYTOPIA.
Why Another Rebrand?
The immediate response from the community has been very polarizing. The team was met with some serious backlash, especially in the minutes before the official announcement.
The primary reason for the rebranding to HYTOPIA was for trademarking, SEO, .com extension and full brand ownership. The team has secured all relevant domains now which were previously unattainable.
The official website is now https://hytopia.com.
In another post on DIscord by ArkDev, he stated that another SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company with an existing TOPIA trademark had threatened legal action over use of the name TOPIA. They were pushed to make a name change or face legal action enforcing the trademark. The team believed they had a case against it, but ultimately decided to simply rebrand to HYTOPIA and avoid the legal battle altogether, while also owning all facets of the new brand name.
Community Concerns
Amongst the backlash, a few valid concerns have been brought up by the community. A few of the main ones being the similarity to another hugely popular Minecraft multiplayer server Hypixel (owned by Hytale).
It is too early to tell if this will be problematic in the future or will raise any concerns.
Another concern is the fact that there has been another rebrand altogether, shortly after the first one. This will cause confusion once again amongst the community and across the ecosystem of products.
Again, it is too early to tell how much of an impact this will have as TOPIA had not gained enough traction just yet. Also the game has not released yet. Rebranding post-launch will have been much more problematic.
Do I need to do anything?
No. ArkDev confirmed through Discord that you DO NOT need to anything. All metadata/NFT images will be updated in the next 24 hours. Restaking will not be necessary.
The $TOPIA token will also remain the same and will now be of higher priority in getting listing on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko – now that the rebranding is finalized.
Conclusion
Ark has adamantly stated that HYTOPIA is not being built to be just another web3 game, but rather the world’s largest UGC-based games platform. This is why the rebranding was a necessary step in securing a proper foundation.
From the official announcement by ArkDev on Discord:
“HYTOPIA reflects a name that we’ve begun to trademark; we own the .com and nearly every major domain variant; there is no search, public perception, or branding competition.
With this name change, there are some important things we want to point out.
The $TOPIA token is not changing; HYTOPIA’s token remains $TOPIA.
The world contracts are not migrating – there is not another airdrop or collection migration happening. The world assets will be rebranded within the next 24 hours. The existing design style will stay, but the “TOPIA” logo on all worlds will change to “HYTOPIA”.
We own Hytopia.com and it already points to our HYTOPIA website.
Our legal diligence has done a full sweep of the trademark and sees no issue in its filing.
We are beginning to update submissions to conigecko, coinmarketcap, and many other places. We held off on this as we had been working on acquiring the assets for this name change and didn’t want to have to issue another update across all sites, as we’ve found this to take much longer than the initial token submission.
Our new social handles are @HYTOPIAgg”
Undoubtedly the new rebranding induced another spike of confusion, but ultimately it is very important to secure a stable foundation that is completely ridden of any legal issues. Securing a .com domain is a huge win, especially for the web2 audiences.
With the early beta release expected in September, HYTOPIA continues to chug along.
*Contains affiliate link, see Affiliate Disclaimer
*Contains affiliate link, see Affiliate Disclaimer
*Contains affiliate link, see Affiliate Disclaimer
