I'm not sure what do you mean by place. If you're referring to this specific venue, I get not everyone likes excursions being bundled together with the conference that potentially makes the ticket more expensive than it needs to be. Other than that I have only heard good things about that place.

If you're referring to the city/country in general, the only reason I can think of is because I showed up at the previous HiveFest and my attendance influenced this year's location. Malaysia has one of the lowest crypto adoption in the region according to Chainanalysis and is lagging behind neighbouring countries due to uncompetitiveness in terms of regulation. However we have an active ASEAN community here and I'm very sure many in that community will attend the event this year.