Dreams is Quickly Approaching a Point of No Return.
Picture this, it's June 2020, and you have been playing Dreams for about a month now. The games are good, player count is high, and everything is getting several thousand likes, seems perfect, right? Well just over a year later the game is in a state a disarray, people are leaving, the player count is laughable for the amount of sales, and there hasn't been a significant update since July of last year.
Now, this is frightening as just a hypothetical scenario, but this is real, it's VERY real. Like it or not Dreams is on a steep decline, and that touted "10 year plan" is seeming less and less true by the day. But the worst part is it seems like the solution is being ignored, along with the community.
Dreams over the past year has been in a rough spot, including it's community. We've held out hope for any sort of update, any sort of improvement to the game Dreams, and yet every time we were left with absolutely nothing.
Instead of working on the platform, something only Media Molecule can do, they decide to spend an equivalent amount of time working on games IN Dreams, something that everybody can do. While this is considerate of Media Molecule, is doesn't benefit the community and the player base long-term. Making games is the task of the community, Media Molecule's job is to work on the platform we publish on.
Media Molecule will spend 400 hours on a game to keep the attention of the players for about 3 days. Yet for some reason they refuse to work on Dreams itself, or even tell the community if they are. If they spent 400 hours making an update for Dreams, like perhaps some new logic, or a new feature (which actually enhances the experience of the game, I.e. Co-Create) the community would be overjoyed with the prospect. But it seems like the only time such features are being discussed are when talking about what Media Molecule could, or should have done.
Both myself and several dozen Dreamers are incredibly frustrated with the lack of transparency or basic will to work on Dreams Media Molecule has shown. All of us have poured thousands of hours into this game, I've personally been here since the first day of EA, and to see this pattern of decline and refusal to address it or concerns surrounding it disappoints us all.
Media Molecule, if you see this, I don't hate Dreams, nor your company. I respect both heavily, but it's more than clear this game has been mismanaged which has led to a decline. PLEASE focus on what the community wants. Nobody was asking for a train game, and as cool as it is, it's not what Dreams needs at all. We need new features and tools, new opportunities for gameplay, and online interactions.
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Anxiety over the sustainability of Dreams has been a common topic for some time now, following a large drop after the launch period.
But, while I don’t regularly check, when I have numbers haven’t decreased further since Winter 2020, I think following the updates to the homepage there’s actually been a very modest increase in 2021.
But I’ve spoken to a few creators who are disheartened. I know generally speaking creators should create primarily for themselves but almost every creators enjoys other people experiencing their work and it is one of the selling points of Dreams. We all want more people online, I’m sure Media Molecule included.
I do respectfully disagree that Mm’s efforts to create content aimed at people want to play is counter productive.
A lot of people in the community, and a lot of external pressure has been asking for a more enticing offering for players rather than creators.
The community is making engaging content but I’ve talked before on my channel there is a perception problem, community creations don’t seem to be attracting new players in larger numbers or bringing back lapsed ones. Official content like Tren and Ancient Dangers has more of a chance of this I think, much more so than new logic or gadgets.
Mm have said there are big upcoming updates which will drive activity. I wish they’d arrive sooner as well but we’ve got to cut them a break - COVID decimated video game production across the entire industry and I’m sure Mm have felt the affects of having to be fully home based which they still are to this day.
Multiplayer and some sort of PS5 update are inevitable but we’ve got to be a bit more patient. The good news is Mm have been hiring like crazy and expanding their team which makes the future exciting.
I would like more transparency in terms of the future roadmap. It’s something other live service games do and clear messaging helps give people things to look forward to and sets expectations. But I know setting development deadlines is also very complicated and a lot of these things are even out of Mm’s hands.
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I think the only real complaint here is that you'd like more updates on the progress for what they're working on. They have the trello board, but it's not updated all that regularly, and not to the fine-grained degree of what progress they've made on all the individual things. And they do advertise about those game projects.
It seems like you've taken that fact and extrapolated that they're not doing any work apart from the things they have actively advertised. Me and the others don't think that's a fair extrapolation, basically. If Mm gave more detailed reports on the progress they're already making, you may not extrapolate in the same way even though the fact didn't change.
The whole company isn't needed to work on those games, just as the whole company didn't work on Art's Dream, and the whole company didn't work on Dreamscom--things for the community and players. There's a big chunk of Mm that only work on the engine: new features to come, as well as bug fixing and QA--things for the creators.
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I can understand the frustration. It seems like Media molecule are happy riding on the version of the tools they have now. We as users have literally zero idea if this is the end or will they be updates? It is hard to stick with a platform (in general) if there are serious doubts to its longevity.
I think the issue is that for users to give their time (for free) to media molecule, there has to be something given in return. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Media molecule needs Dreams users to continue existing and the users need/want updates.
However I get the impression that they are working on plenty. My guess is they will bundle tool updates with the release of their two originals projects. The thing is though, they should just open up a bit more about it. Radio silence doesn’t look good. Posts like OP’s are the result of radio silence..
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I don't think everything is quite so doom and gloom as you say but certainly player count is an issue in my mind. Working on a Dream is a TON of work, aside from that fact that if I were doing this on Steam or something, I could at least ask for a $1 buy of the Dream/Game on that platform, here I am investing a ton of time and energy to make a Dream/Game for free, for a very small player base. This is undeniably an issue.
The second issue certainly is a lack of updates and downgrades. The inability for me to upload my own compositions of music to Dreams via the website was nearly a dealbreaker for me. I am a musician first and foremost and was incredibly excited to upload my original music. Then, that was axed almost immediately. It's not as if that solved anything either. Plenty of copyright music on Dreams, its just recorded in a crappy quality using an AUX cable. This is the same for voice acting. I can get great quality audio using my music software on my computer for voice acting, but plugging a mic directly into the PS4 sounds awful. As for updates, I don't understand how there still isn't multiplayer? Being able to play with people would do a ton, I believe. Theres a Dreams community, apparently, but it is invisible. Even at dreamscon, you're walking around alone. If there was any time to beta multiplayer, that would have been it.
I love dreams, but my time investment in it is certainly decreasing. To put so much energy in making a great game for people to have 15 plays or something is really getting to not be worth it.
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My main problem with Dreams is not the lack in updates contents, its the lack of features updates and the main communication of this, the Trello, is almost nothing. There is great chance of creating better dreams with more features updates, something increasing like Mario Maker 2.
In one of my cases i am waiting MORE THAN A YEAR for them to START working on improving the calculator gadged to support proper basic array function and things alike, and its still in the future to START DEVELOPMENT. Of course you can try to build it in it more basic gadged, but the gameplay thermo can take a seriusly hit, mine must be around 5% of the thermo for EACH ONE, if you are a creator trying to make a robust game in Dreams, not a scenery, not a animation and not a music, but the whole packaged, you know that gameplay thermo is not gold, ITS DIAMOND. Because of things like this, creating dreams can be very limited and tiring, fisically and mentally.
The "sort array" i had to make and some more for the dream i am working:
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SwarmHammer,
When we're talking player count, I mean total on the game, not my individual creations. There is currently 615 people GLOBALLY on dreams. This is insanely low... You can't say this isn't an issue. And the release of the PS5 probably has something to do with this.
Putting a ton of work into a game when the entire player pool is maybe 2000 active accounts? Thats seriously low...
The best part of dreams was it gave you an audience, but that audience is nearly gone. I want to bring some fun to people with a game. Unfortunatly, Dreams is turning into meme-ville a little bit rather than robust creations.
And as, X-Pvsmen-X said, if you try to actually build a functioning game and not just a Set, Sculpture, etc., etc., the thermo becomes a huge issue. I don't see why an entire scene has to render at once. Why cant we use the Look sensor to only render what is visible like all other games to get more out of the thermo?
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DOOOOOOOM! [Citation needed]
These are serious accusations.
Dreams is 'in a state of disarray'. The community is 'being ignored'. The users have been left with 'absolutely nothing'. Media Molecule are working on content like Tren 'instead of' working on the platform. The content Mm has published and has revealed for later this year 'doesn't benefit the community and the player base long-term'. Mm 'refuse to work on Dreams itself'. Mm has shown a 'lack of basic will to work on Dreams'. There is a 'pattern of decline and refusal to address it'. 'It's more than clear this game has been mismanaged'.
I for one am horrified. The ground has been rent from beneath me; I feel empty inside. Care to share your sources?
Thing is, I've met a number of the people who work at Mm and they all struck me as passionate about their project. Consequently I find it hard to believe the things you're saying about them. It seems more likely you're projecting your frustrations at having to wait for features that have been promised because ten years seems like a long time. (In fairness, it is a long time.) If you don't have any evidence for the gross mismanagement of the long-term plan for Dreams and are in fact merely impatient, please say so. Maybe leave Dreams be for a year or two and then come back and see how accurate your predictions are?
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The critical thing is COMMUNICATION. The radio silence following the re-activation of this board and dreamscom is particularly disturbing. It felt like Mm were winding up for big changes, but then we get... deafening silence.
We all appreciated that Mm is a smaller developer, and it's clear that the community here appreciates that. We all also appreciate that COVID was a body-blow and anyone reasonable knows this means delays.
But the truth of the matter is that the number of active users is unsustainably tiny, and we have no idea if anything will change in the future to pull more users in. Dreamscom got next to no mention in the gaming press (I saw one lonely post on PushSquare), and the vast majority of the wider gaming community have completely forgotten/written off Dreams as a failed experiment (look at any comments board on any article on Dreams in the past 12 months and try to find any positive comments).
Nothing is pulling in new users, and the community is bleeding quality creators at an unsustainable rate. Of the creators I follow, <20% have posted anything in the past 6 months. And I'm constantly searching for new creators to follow.
Dreams needs reasons for new users to buy-in or re-engage. There is now a huge body of brilliant content out there, but unless the wider gaming community learns that (and can access it without wading through oceans of zero-effort garbage), nothing will change.
To me, the most immediate solution to some of these problems is overhaling search functions and activity feeds;
- Improve the order of search results - 'trending' and 'most likes' is basically a random number generator and drowns your results in junk. Search results by date alone would be a HUGE improvement.
- Let creators manage their own files so the best content can be more easily spotlighted. Filtering by date, trending, most liked etc just doesn't work.
- Search term/tag blacklists - let us filter out the garbage (I'd give my right arm to never see another FNAF/FNF creation)!
- Do a better job of spotlighting quality curators an letting them show the community the good stuff - let curators with the chops publish activity feeds on the dream surfing homepage.
We raise these concerns because we want Dreams to succeed. There is enormous unrealised potential here - Dreams could be 'Roblox but not hideous'. But ~1000 daily users, most of whom are the toxic FNAF/FNF drama community who clog messages with 'tell X I'm sorry unblock me', is not sustainable.
Please, Mm, tell your community what's in the pipeline. We can tell you what is likely to work and what is not worth you time. This board alone has been a stream of great ideas. I can't comment on how technically feasible they are, but almost all of the contributions would be drastic improvements.
We all want this project to succeed, but Dreams needs an massive overhaul to reach its full potential.
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Another thing that does not help Dreams on the player side and it’s true for many other “niche” games: people move on to the newer thing released. A ton of awaited games have been released since Dreams official release. Players move on. Let’s attract new ones like other games do.
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To : QuietlyWrong
The thing is YOU had the ability to talk to Mm developers. The average creator does not, including me. I'm sure all of them are passionate but that doesn't negate the fact that actual updates for this game are few and far between.
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The thing is YOU had the ability to talk to Mm developers. The average creator does not, including me.
I don't disagree. Not everyone is lucky enough to live within a reasonable distance of a game convention that Mm have gone to, nor do all have the means to afford it. I'm not ignorant of this, though my comment was not intended as a boast. I merely stated this as justification for my assertion that the developers are passionate about Dreams and I hoped this would be cheering news to anyone who fears that the developers in fact don't care to work on it. In the face of a number of unsubstantiated statements I thought I would set a good example and attempt to provide some basis for my optimistic rebuttal. Admittedly, simply acknowledging the team's passion is a weak argument (no amount of passion would stand up in the face of a publisher like Sony pulling the plug) but it's all I can offer and it seemed like a positive point in that context.
I'm sure all of them are passionate but that doesn't negate the fact that actual updates for this game are few and far between.
Again, I don't disagree. Where we don't seem to match up is in that I feel like the intermissions between updates are understandable, expected, typical, acceptable. It's going to take a long time to see all the things that Mm have promised. Mm are between a rock and a hard place. If they tell us what they're working on, like multiplayer, they get daily abuse from people who want it now. If they don't tell us what they're working on, they get daily abuse from people who think the game is dead, or that Mm is not communicating with their paying customers. There is no happy medium. By all means — and here I address any naysayer, not the OP in particular — express your impatience with the slow pace of development or communication of such, but try to avoid voicing any fears about the cessation of development until evidence of such emerges. I think that's unhelpful.
All that said, and moving on to other points in the thread, I would enjoy seeing more information about development progress, but I certainly don't feel any entitlement to it, so I accept my moderate disappointment in this regard. I do have the benefit of being a very patient man. My window on the community is a relatively positive one, probably due to the fact that I've basically curated my own twitter timeline of some of the more creative and interesting Dreamers, so I don't see any of these toxic youngsters with their online spats about 'garbage' content.
Comparisons with Roblox do intrigue me. Roblox was first released in 2006, after a period of beta. Being free-to-play gave it a massive numbers advantage over Dreams, but its financial model is built on microtransactions. If Dreams never goes down the microtransactions route, I'll be grateful! But from our lofty perspective of fifteen years later, it's clear both what can be achieved by developing something over such a long period of time as long as you keep at it, and what a long time it can take to add new features. It took over six years before iOS support was added. Ten years for VR support. Over that time, its developers have grown and grown, from a handful of staff to over a thousand! That's over ten times the size of Mm at the moment. There's no reason to believe Dreams can hope to be anywhere near as successful but for the time being I'm happy to watch Dreams' 'ten-year plan' unfold at its own pace. I know nothing of the Roblox community. I wonder if they had periods in the early years when people were desperately clamouring for updates?
What form will 'Multiplayer' take when it finally arrives? Dreams was built, as far as I understand it, for four-player multiplayer. At one point I remember Alex Evans teased the possibility of there maybe being as many as eight players but even then he immediately down-played this as a nice-to-have, not especially likely. I wonder how many of the people waiting desperately for the Multiplayer update recognise the four-player limit as a strong possibility? This is what has been promised.
It's my opinion that if the original plan for four-player online multiplayer is still the goal, then its development is getting on the long side. I would like to think — and I must stress that this is purest speculation with no basis in fact — that maybe Mm have taken a step back and looked at how they could increase this limit. That would easily account for the length of time taken to develop this feature. Then again, it may be wishful thinking. Wishful thinking that means I'd probably be disappointed if Multiplayer eventually releases with the long-promised four-player maximum, though I know I'd have no basis for complaint.
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Ok something people MUST realize, and fast. Having more people play will NOT increase your personal play counter for any of your Dreams. The fact is that on any platform even if you had millions of possible players, most of the time new and indie content maybe only gets a few hundreds. Looking at Dreams player count is not a good indicator of its health. Players come and go, and after a year it is very normal to see low numbers.
Only one way to make people play your levels and increase your play count: advertise it everywhere even to people not having Dreams. They might buy it and enjoy your game and others. This game could and can only sell well if we take charge of its promotion campaign. Not Mm or Sony. We make sure Dreams is fun and worthy by our creations. Mm job is to provide us the tools we need as creators to do ours. Unity, unreal engine only became popular and widely used because of its creators. Epic or the Unity people did not do much promotion to put its engine on all search engines. They live on their users making content.
And there hasn’t been any significant update since a while now. You’ll see them back for a few weeks when multiplayer arrives. Only to see the numbers dwindle down again because hell, there won’t be any multiplayer games made for a while after the update. Apart from the usual garbage zero effort levels with barely working MP in it. Also apart from Mm own effort making a game for it, tutorials, videos, and documentation. It won’t come alone though. You bet that MP will come with a bunch of other creation update promises that will help us making MP games. Oh and MP is inevitable, PS5 update of any kind is not. No words on any PS5 update for Dreams. Certainly not before there is native support for PS5 PSVR 2.0. People will not buy an outdated HMD, a PS4 camera and get the free adapter so they can play PSVR games not taking advantages of the PS5 power
Another point that has been brought up here: about search functions and how the system for finding games work. I don’t think more work on this should be done, again. They worked on it multiple times, and it will never satisfy everyone. The goal is not even to give you the best suggestions in trend or anything. It gives you the actual trends and yes it can be garbage games (many people like playing mostly garbage games on their phones, it’s a thing). And I think they have worked enough on that part of the game. Would be nice to have our tool bag improved too, once in a while.
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Here's a wee story that highlights some of the key problems Dreams faces;
I've been aggressively spruiking my Armored Core-styled mecha shooter on several mecha reddit threads. The UNIVERSAL response has been "This looks great and I'd love to play it, but what is Dreams?"
Of course it's silly to presume every gamer, even every PS4 owner, knows Dreams in intimate detail. However, Dreams at present is a non-entity in the collective PS community. This is a SERIOUS problem for long-term community growth, and not an issue a handful of committed users like us can fix.
This isn't Dreams' only problem, and it's not as though a marketing blitz would fix EVERY problem with Dreams, but it's a serious threat to long term viability. Unless there is a constant influx of new users, attrition of existing users means a dead community sooner rather than later.
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There is a sense of entitlement in this thread that is hard to take seriously.
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