'Dreams' Is Hurting From A Lack Of Players (Kotaku)

[VanWinkle]

It's crazy how I stopped playing Dreams for like 9 months, and went back to it when I got my PS5, only to realize that a good majority of the content littering the main dream surfing menu is the same stuff that was available when I last played the game around February! I had a feeling the game would be like this, where most people are just slowly working on their tech and doing tech demos and stuff but a very small amount of actual games.

Its ambition was its undoing. It's trying to do to much. It's too long and arduous to actually make a fun game, and that's a death kneel for a game trying to be the next LBP.

 

[DiceHands]

I am someone who has put well over 300 hours into dreams. Ive been saying from the beginning that until they turn this into a fully fledged game engine that can be capable of producing games outside of the dreams game itself, there is no real motivation for players to keep creating. They need to create a PC version that lets people actually make games and break away from the dreams eco system.

Yes, i get that it kind of goes against what dreams is all about, but thats the way forward IMO for this. At some point the costs outweigh the benefits for the best creators. Why spend hundreds of hours creating something of quality that you dont own and cant do anything with when you could go get game maker or unity and start making something that can be broken out, sold, or atleast used for resume purposes?

You also have to wade through so much garbage that finding quality games gets harder and harder, making the best creators that might not be getting any plays avoid using the engine all together.

With things like Bolt visual scripting coming standard with unity, Dreams is missing their chance at capitalizing on pulling in creators that prefer visual coding to their engine to make things in it.

 

[woolyninja]

Make creation online coop already! I'd love to build worlds with my friends

 

[Diogo Arez]

Unfortunately not surprised, I adored the story mode it had but the creation side of things lost me after about 15h due to how complex it truly was, that coupled with most creations not being that great I phased out of the game :/

 

[Hailinel]

It's too complicated. I got frustrated in the tutorial for creating character models. I was expecting something very simple the way they talked about it but nothing seemed to work the way I wanted.

Also most of the games I played in it were bad. I remember during the beta all these games looked so cool but there ended up being so few and mostly bad.

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I just remember most articles on the beta I saw were along the lines of "Someone recreated Dead Space in Dreams", and like, OK

Someone using the tools to recreate a small slice of an existing game as a test is one thing, but creating something wholly original and actually fun to play from scratch is something else. The flexibility of the tools won't provide much if they're too complex for the vast majority of players to grapple.

 

[DontHateTheBacon]

I still wouldn't play it. Especially not with the limited SSD space on the PS5. I think it's just a niche product with niche appeal. It's never going to "break-out" into anything bigger.

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Everything doesn't have to be GOW/Uncharted/TLOU.

Just successful.

 

[Richter1887]

It is a very lovely game that I go back to every few months to see what new levels were made. Some of the games that are made in it are amazing. Especially the puzzle ones.

The main campaign is also really good and well worth the price. If anybody never played it I recommend they do.

 

[Dyno]

It sits in an awkward spot. First its more complex and deeper than LBP's tools, which could already be daunting and also had the same issue of bad content swamping the good content. But secondly its depth and freedom means anything I may want to make on there could be better served made on Unity. Yes that does mean going even more complex ofc, but I have a product I can sell at the end instead.

LBP gotnmeninterested in content creation and pushed me toward learning actual environments like Unity and Blender, then little indie darlings like KSP got me into making mods for them. Dreams runs into this same issue harder for me.

I see amazing projects taking place on there and cant help but think to myself if they put that time and effort into Unity, UE etc. they may have a product they could literally kick-start a new career off of.

 

[Mr_Antimatter]

I own it and love it, but yeah it needs to come to ps5 and pc, and really needs a way to sort out the trash in favor of the real gems.

 

[Richietto]

Game needs a PC release honestly.

 

[BossLackey]

I think they really messed up on the their messaging. I'm a on video game forums and news sites every single day, and even I didn't really know when Dreams "came out". It was a murky, slow release. With games that rely on player created content, that is a terrible way to release.

 

[Negotiator117]

The article is saying that the problem is that too many people are using it to create, not enough people are playing the games.

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I thought it was saying not enough are using it at all, it's not attracting enough interest. I'm not surprised people are using it to create as that's it primary feature. I hope it becomes a huge success as its a tremendous piece of work.

 

[Coi]

This game screams PS+ Collection. I'm not interested on it, but it will open the curiosity of at least thousands and thousands of potential users.

 

[CloseTalker]

The kind of players that have the skill, time and passion for dreams are probably studying to be game devs honestly.

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That's true too. Dreams might have crossed the line between "fun level making video game" and "so deep, you might as well just be making video games"

 

[Deleted member 437]

I remember resetera telling me that dreams was going to set the world on fire.

I just lold.

 

[Velveteen Touch]

The most I heard about it was during it's beta period. By the time it was actually released people were like, "Oh it's actually out now. We'll see how that goes." Then nobody mentioned it again.

 

[DiceHands]

The kind of players that have the skill, time and passion for dreams are probably studying to be game devs honestly.

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its def this. I am in that same boat. I was working for hours on a project in dreams, and then it kind of hit me that i am wasting time when i could make this all in unity and actually publish it for more people. Thats what broke the game for me.

im someone who loves the dreams engine, if i had the option to buy a license and use its tools on PC to make my own games, id do it in a heartbeat.

 

[TheConfidenceMan]

Every time I see a Dreams thread I feel a twinge of guilt that I haven't picked it up in a while.

 

[Ryuhza]

I find my issue with Dreams stems more from the multitude of games surrounding it. With the popularity of GAAS and things like battle passes, seasons, etc. every game is trying to keep your attention, keep you logging in, keep you grinding. Between that and the rest of life, its hard to make time for something more meditative and far less immediately rewarding. Doubly so when that game uses a control scheme quite unlike anything else, and demands regular practice for prime efficiency.

Also, I don't like the UI for navigating through user content. The basics of it work ok, but I find it quite unintuitive in a lot of regards, particularly when looking through the totality of another user's works.

 

[tatwo]

Haven't launched it since couple months after it came out in Early Access.

 

[IIFloodyII]

It sits in an awkward spot. First its more complex and deeper than LBP's tools, which could already be daunting and also had the same issue of bad content swamping the good content. But secondly its depth and freedom means anything I may want to make on there could be better served made on Unity. Yes that does mean going even more complex ofc, but I have a product I can sell at the end instead.

LBP gotnmeninterested in content creation and pushed me toward learning actual environments like Unity and Blender, then little indie darlings like KSP got me into making mods for them. Dreams runs into this same issue harder for me.

I see amazing projects taking place on there and cant help but think to myself if they put that time and effort into Unity, UE etc. they may have a product they could literally kick-start a new career off of.

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Something Sony should really be looking at really, give the most interesting projects an actual budget and spin them off of Dreams, but even that probably won't help Dreams itself as I think it's pretty hard to sell stuff through those platforms, due to most having no interest in paying, when everything is free. But just give talented individuals more reason to stick with it, instead of jumping up to Unity or Unreal or whatever.

 

[Mochi]

I really wish Dreams was a PC tool like . . . Photoshop or even Blender that I could use out of the box after purchase or even with a subscription license to create stuff for other projects. It would be great to be able to use it with other applications.

 

[you]

Dreams should really be bundled with every PS5 and serve as the basis for something like PS Home. It's phenomenal.

 

[KalBalboa]

I remember resetera telling me that dreams was going to set the world on fire.

I just lold.

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[ReginaldXIV]

It needs a PC version. I don't know if it'll do well on PC, but the act of creating would be more intuitive.

 

[elenarie]

Too many comments here about people wanting to play rather than create, when that isn't the audience issue the article is focused on. The article is predominately concerned with lack of engagement from people playing games and lack of engagement with quality creations (choosing instead to engage with the memes or things featuring familiar properties). With that issue in mind, it seems freemium would be the perfect fix to that solution. Maybe lock game publishing features or the creation tools behind a paywall so that you don't have an influx of bad creations in the market to go along with it. It seems like there are good creations there, it's just a matter of increasing the amount of players to engage with them.

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Basically how the Steam market works right now. :p Except that companies funnel money into marketing to get noticed, and Dreams content creators can't exactly do that.

In retrospective, this should have been a free game to incentivise people to invest further into the Playstation eco system, rather than selling it as a premium. It's the same story as Project Spark all over again.

 

[LebGuns]

They should put it on PS+, PC, make it crossplay, and most importantly make it FREE to play the content (paid to be a creator).

 

[Orioto]

Dreams peaked durig the beta. Cause Dreams was only interesting for creators from the start. I said it initially.

Take Mario Maker. People go there cause they know what they want and they'll find a great amount of it, with great quality.
Now in Dreams, what would you look for there, and how much of it will be descent ? It doesn't have a target, as a game content provider, it's random and mediocre most of the time. You try it and have fun 2 days and move on.

Dreams is an insane tool. Revolutionary. But it's just not able to become a game resource for people.

What it needs is to have a free version to play games, without the editor part. So good games can at least be played by everyone potentially if they get viral.

 

[Deleted member 437]

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Come on, we all knew the truth.

 

[poklane]

Needs to be on PC, the PS+ Collection and PS Now.

 

[Vitamin_B_Complex]

This is why Dreams should have come pre-installed on every PS5 🤷🏻‍♂️

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And PC, this game NEEDS cross-play with PC.

 

[FarSight XR-20]

This should be free-to-play. This game doesn't deserve to be wasted.

 

[Daxa]

I got it on sale, and the discovery tools are very very bad, and if you want to do some fairly basic stuff, you have to set up a profile that is public-only, which discourages you even more from finding maps and things like that. And I literally didn't even know the game had a semi-official story campaign until I read this thread.

The good news is that all these issues could theoretically be fixed, if they ever want to "relaunch" it for PS5.

 

[ghostcrew]

Without wanting to throw them under the bus (because I love the studio to bits), I feel like MM created an absolutely amazing game/game creation tool and then completely dropped the ball when it came to post launch community management and engagement.

It just felt like there was instantly zero presence for the game once it released out of early access. No amazing community drives or encouragement to get involved. There were official Twitch streams but they got an absolute woeful amount of viewers.

They needed to be shouting from the rooftops about games that had been made in Dreams. Marketing the fact that, here's this awesome game and if you want to play it then you need to buy Dreams. And this is why you should be buying it because the community is amazing and there's all these incentives or fun events etc...

But I feel like we got none of that. Can anyone really highlight even one game that was made in Dreams that MM/Sony marketed and gave presence to? Like, a year after the game/tools have been available to buy? That kinda sucks.

 

[Mahonay]

It's extremely hard to make anything of quality in the editor. It really does require you to dump a mountain of hours into it, as if you're developing an actual game. So it requires a pretty high level of investment and attachment to Dreams.

Along with that, the created content curation has always been annoyingly narrow and feeds you the same stuff repeatedly. You have to really dig in and go out of your way to find anything that's not being featured.

I love Dreams but they missed a crucial step to make everything more accessible and user friendly. Although maybe that was the sacrifice that was made with providing tools that are this powerful?

 

[Doctor_Thomas]

I bought it

It's crazy what people can do with it...

But, unlike LBP where I could knock together levels with ease, Dreams put me waaaaay out of my depth and I think that was probably a common sentiment.

It's impressive, but it's way more learning than I had time for

 

[touchfuzzy]

It's a weird game is it's too daunting for the average person to make anything in, and basically everything that does get made isn't worth playing over another actual real game. So there's not really any reason to play it for the average person.

 

[The Third Heat]

Yeah, I'm curious to know what Mm and Sony's expectations for the game were before I start making assumptions about it's "failure."

And I get why a PC version makes sense, but it also feels antithetical to the game's main mission, which was to have an easily accessible game creator that didn't require a robust PC. If Mm wants to do it, then go for it. I think at this point, it might not be a bad idea to help boost the PS4/5 experience, and give game makers an avenue towards publishing outside of Dreams. I'd also hope if they did, they'd introduce KB/M support for the PS4/5 version.

I think what Mm needs is to have two creation modes: simplified and expert. Create a mode that's very template-heavy, with grid-locked asset placement and other restrictions, in order to easily create games and levels that are a bit more quality than some of the jankier stuff. Right now, the time it takes to create a quality level/game is insane, and the results of that work too often go unnoticed in-game. If you could hop into an FPS template and create some bonkers level in an hour, it might feel more worthwhile. But as it stands now, that task could take you several hours, and that's after you do the numerous tutorials required to understand the game.

Dreams lives and dies by the contributions of the community. Its best feature is a robust catalogue of pre-made assets that are community-created. Being able to use that "asset pack" more easily could help the game immensely with the more causal crowd.

And yeah, a F2P "Dreams Player" would be a great idea. Get those games more visibility outside of the people already invested in Dreams.

 

[Raijinto]

That comparison to it being the opposite of YouTube is quite perfect and honest coming from someone who really likes the game. Seems like there is a decent amount of people who love sharing these things on social media but the lack of actual players who play these games has been stark for a while. I'm definitely not alone as someone who played a few MM creations along with Art's Dream when it came out and then dropped it for good, but even then the likes that some of the better non-copyright infringement dreams were getting were... alarming, and to read in the article that it has only gotten worse is kinda shocking, because they weren't all that high back in February/March 2019.

I kinda have to disagree with the suggestions that there's anything Sony/MM can do to rectify the situation when it just seems like the game is no fun at its core. Fall Guys exploded because it was fun & on PS+, just being on PS+ isn't a guarantee of anything.

In amongst all of the acclaim the game was receiving at launch it seems like this video was more reflective of how it was received on the whole:

 

[Incite]

I looked forward to this game specifically for the VR component.
The long wait for that without really knowing when it would come dampened my enthusiasm.
When it finally arrived I was completely over the Move controllers and experienced them as an active impediment to any piece of software. I loved the VR potential but the hardware stopped my creativity cold too many times.

If only this was on Quest 2 I could at least have a damn analog stick to walk a character around freely and physically wander around a room without the camera losing me repeatedly and be able to just jump in casually without the setup PSVR demands.

For me it was too late on old VR hardware.

Once VR comes out on Ps5 in the future my husband and I will check it out again.

 

[Rzarekta]

I don't understand how this game didn't blow up in communities like this one. I really don't get it.

 

[nekkid]

Creation games are a tough sell. There's so many options in Dreams, but what's the audience for it? The number of people who will spend the time to make something cool are minimal, and the potential consumers of that content are more likely to want to just play standard games.

Things like Minecraft and Mario Maker work because of their simplicity at launch (Minecraft could expand on this over time because it hit a critical mass). Dreams is a technical marvel, but I feel that's also it's downfall.

 

[Kyougar]

The PS4 tools to create content are too bothersome for most content creators. Sure, you can make awesome creations but it takes 10 times more effort and time than making something on the PC with the same tools.
And that doesn't even include one of the most overlooked and important pieces of the modding community:
Modding libraries and common frameworks. Modders on PC don't invent the wheel every time, they don't create everything from the ground up, they use other modding libraries, common frameworks, assets, etc.
If you play any modded Skyrim, Fallout, Rimworld, Minecraft, Factorio, etc. you always have a set of mods that are 100% needed because every other mod is dependable on them. Those libraries and frameworks did the heavy lifting so that a mod creator can concentrate on making the content and not the insides. It enables modders to cut down the time needed to create their mods by tens to hundreds or even thousand times. And most likely they provide the framework for most modders to even create mods.

Have some Dreams.

 

[fourfourfun]

Sorry to say, the most appealing part of LBP was the single player mode, while the creation engine was great for enthusiasts and news articles.

Dreams simply took the bit that appealed to the least amount of people and went to town on it. With nowhere near the immediacy of Mario Maker, its become something interesting to watch on YouTube occasionally.

Fantastic endeavour that simply has no audience. I don't even think you could give it away on PS to build a community.

 

[Deleted member 21709]

I feel bad for MM, 6 years in development and very few people bought or cared about the game.

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It's (especially with VR added) one of the most notable PS4 exclusives.

I'm just disappointed that very few people here or in the press care about it.

The PS4 tools to create content are too bothersome for most content creators. Sure, you can make awesome creations but it takes 10 times more effort and time than making something on the PC with the same tools.
And that doesn't even include one of the most overlooked and important pieces of the modding community:
Modding libraries and common frameworks. Modders on PC don't invent the wheel every time, they don't create everything from the ground up, they use other modding libraries, common frameworks, assets, etc.
If you play any modded Skyrim, Fallout, Rimworld, Minecraft, Factorio, etc. you always have a set of mods that are 100% needed because every other mod is dependable on them. Those libraries and frameworks did the heavy lifting so that a mod creator can concentrate on making the content and not the insides. It enables modders to cut down the time needed to create their mods by tens to hundreds or even thousand times. And most likely they provide the framework for most modders to even create mods.

Have some Dreams.

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Dreams is all about sharing assets and collaborating. Not every Dreams creator has to create everything from the ground up.

So many people have an opinion on Dreams without knowing what it is.

(And yes, I agree it should have a PC version and should have come pre-installed with every PS5.)

 

[slider]

I bought it because it's amazing. But I didn't have the time or talent to get the best from it so it's sat unloved in my library.

I wish things had shaken out differently though.

 

[Transistor]

They really need to put this as a PS+ game to revitalize the community.

 

[Sedated]

Tbh even after being so simple a tool for what it achieves it is still a bit complicated for the average consumer. These types of games have audience on pc. Dreams needs pc version it can definitely do big numbers there.

 

[HarryDemeanor]

I feel like this was always going to be how it ended up.

 

[Deleted member 21709]

I just remember most articles on the beta I saw were along the lines of "Someone recreated Dead Space in Dreams", and like, OK

Someone using the tools to recreate a small slice of an existing game as a test is one thing, but creating something wholly original and actually fun to play from scratch is something else. The flexibility of the tools won't provide much if they're too complex for the vast majority of players to grapple.

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There are a lot of games that are 'actually fun to play' on Dreams.

smh