Dreams Is Dying: Support Ends For Playstation Creative Program

Media Molecule’s Dreams has to be the most ambitious idea I’ve ever seen attempted on a game console. One of the first games announced for the PS4 — but not released until late in its lifecycle due to lengthy development — Dreams was less of a game and more of a game maker. This was not a simple, watered-down tool like Nintendo‘s Game Builder Garage — this was a full-fledged, kitted-out suite of development tools through which it was possible to make virtually anything in virtual 3D space, provided you could master the interface.

But despite its massive potential, Dreams never truly caught fire with the mainstream. We can only speculate why that is, but two things stand out for me. One is that all that power comes with a price: Dreams is rather complicated and overwhelming. I found it rather difficult to get anything to look good and gave up quickly, choosing to play other people’s games instead. I found I wasn’t alone. The library of user creations you can access on Dreams is a graveyard of unfinished projects that started with high ambition but were abandoned when the tool proved too frustrating.

The second issue is that it’s unprecedented for a development tool this powerful (and complicated) to be tethered to a game console with no means of distribution any other way. The level of time and investment one could apply into learning Dreams could be equally applied to learning an ACTUAL game development tool like Unity — and then you can sell your game and show it to people who DON’T own Unity. I think Sony‘s biggest mistake with Dreams was not offering a PC version, or making the program more open.

Media Molecule says they were “not able to define a sustainable path” for Dreams, which probably means they couldn’t justify spending cash on continued updates to the program with such a small userbase. So they’ve announced updates to Dreams will cease this September. The program will still be available and purchasable, but more limited — upload space on your account will be restricted to 5GB. It’s expected that interest in the program will continue to dwindle from there. That’s a pity.