PlayStation creation game Dreams to cease support

If you’ve been looking forward to possible PS5 or PC versions of U.K. developer Media Molecule’s game creation tool, we’ve got some unfortunate news. 

Media Molecule shared on Tuesday via blog post that support for Dreams is ceasing. The ambitious title, known for allowing players to create almost anything they could imagine, will be getting its last updates at some point before and during September 2023, at which point support for the game will end. 

This means that moving forward, Media Molecule will not be holding its community-focused awards and events like the Impys, and after a certain point no further patches will be released. In preparation for this, servers are being migrated so players can keep buying and playing Dreams in the future, though this comes with a new 5 GB storage limitation online. 

“Whilst we’ve always had the desire to build on the foundation of Dreams and expand the experience, when reviewing our plans we were not able to define a sustainable path,” the developers explained in the blog post. “We made the decision to change the studio product strategy. This is obviously disappointing to many people inside and outside of Mm, however we are incredibly excited for what will come next.”

Dreams had a long journey from conception to release, first being teased at the PlayStation Meeting 2013, with a more direct teaser coming in 2014. At E3 2015, PlayStation fully unveiled Dreams, with a promise of a beta to come in the following year. That beta was then pushed to 2017, and then to December 2018. Dreams then launched in a limited early access in 2019, before its wider release came in 2020, almost seven years after the game had first been teased. Dreams had originally been teased before the PS4 launched, and finally arrived mere months ahead of the PS5.

When Dreams released, Dreams garnered critical praise, with many outlets praising Dreams’ nearly limitless potential. The game developed a small but extremely passionate community, with impressive creations regularly going viral on Twitter. While Media Molecule did support the game for over three years, certain updates never came, and now it seems they never will. 

Dreams only supported local multiplayer, or couch co-op, and despite the developers adding it to the game’s Trello board — a roadmap of planned updates and bug fixes in a game’s production schedule post-launch — it seems now that multiplayer will never arrive.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, no PS5 or PC versions of Dreams were ever released, the latter especially shocking considering PlayStation’s recent focus on increased PC support over the last couple of years. While Dreams is perfectly playable on PS5, a lack of a dedicated version means it can’t truly take advantage of the PS5’s increased hardware specs, and it also means that there will never be a PS VR2 update at a time when the headset needs new software. Most curious of all, Dreams was never included in the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog, despite the vast majority of other PlayStation first-party games being included. 

Dreams has been an inspiration for many, even serving as a pathway for some to enter the gaming industry. Moon Studios, the developers of the Ori games, notably hired a designer who did not have any experience working on a game available for purchase, but had spent two years crafting a game in Dreams.

As for the developers at Media Molecule, it’s not clear what’s next, but the team is already working on its next project, which is confirmed not to be a sequel to Dreams. Acquired by Sony in 2011, Media Molecule is one of the more distinct studios in the PlayStation first-party roster, with a focus on artistic and creative games like the LittleBigPlanet franchise and Tearaway. The studio is much smaller than its cohorts like Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, and even served as an inspiration to Hideo Kojima himself, who intentionally modeled the reborn Kojima Productions after Media Molecule, setting a cap of 100 full-time employees.