Media Molecule posted an extensive update yesterday on the future of Dreams, the DIY game and art creator released in 2019 for PlayStation 4. First and foremost for our purposes, the platform isn’t shutting down and Dreams is not being removed from sale. That said, Media Molecule is shifting their attention to a new, unnamed project and Dreams is heading into a twilight state of existence for the foreseeable future. Obviously, sadly, it’ll all shut down one day but these changes will hopefully postpone that fate for as long as possible.
Most immediately, a server migration will happen in late May in order to “preserve the security and stability of Dreams” for the future. This will not only limit the amount of drive space that users have to store their creations, it also means the end of several live features. The ability to @ mention players, monitor their activity feeds, send projects to the game from the Indreams.me website and more are all ending in just over a month. Given the invasions and attacks that have plagued LittleBigPlanet in recent years, you can see the thinking behind these decisions; this is why we can’t have nice things.
The team also announced that their internal “live service support” for Dreams will be ending later in the Summer after September 1st. That means no more feature updates or annual community events in-game. They’re even removing the ‘Message of the Day’ feature and overhauling a handful of Trophies. The team will then continue to spotlight user creations on social media, during live streams, and on their Impsider homepage.
Dreams is unlike any other game we’ve worked on at Media Molecule. It has been exciting, challenging and most importantly an unforgettable collaborative journey with you all over the years, from beta to launch to the first DreamWalk to the 4th Impy Awards. Today we’d like to share two important updates for Dreams in 2023, regarding our upcoming server migration and live service.
As we continue to evaluate and evolve our priorities for the studio and Dreams, we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue live support for Dreams after 1st September, 2023 to shift our focus to an exciting new project. You’ll continue to be able to play, create and share Dreams with others after September, but we won’t be releasing any more updates to the game or events such as DreamsCom, All Hallows’ Dreams or the Impy Awards. We’re incredibly proud of the work we’ve done in developing Dreams – such as our content releases, Create updates and live events – and we are endlessly grateful to the community for their belief and continuous contributions since launch.
Although this is challenging news we do have a few more updates on the way, including the much anticipated Tren, and a significant improvement to animation and our last Create mode update.
We will continue to share and celebrate creations in Dreams with the wider world on our social channels, our streams, Impsider roundups and more. We will be continuing our in-game curation work to make sure the Dreamiverse feels as alive as it always has been, and to surface amazing creations from you, our community, for everyone to enjoy.
We know this won’t be an easy message for everyone to hear, and it’s certainly not been an easy decision – Dreams has been a special project for Media Molecule and helping this burgeoning community of game developers, tinkerers, creatives, collaborators and dreamers grow and express themselves remains one of the best things we’ve ever done. Thank you for being part of it with us – we look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.
Dreams Announcement – April 11, 2023
The full post contains much more about the extensive changes coming to Dreams including an FAQ section where the team confirmed a few finer details. Hinting at the platform’s financial success the team mentions that “we were not able to define a sustainable path” to keep actively adding and expanding on Dreams. They also added that critical bug fixes may be addressed in the future but no major updates including multiplayer, PlayStation VR or PlayStation 5 support are forthcoming.
Thanks to everyone who pointed out the news on this, I’ve added a late-May and September date to the Watch List calendar for the events detailed above.