Media Molecule, the Sony-owned developer of Dreams, has announced it will end live service support for the PlayStation 4 game creation system in September as it concentrates on a different project.
“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,” the studio said in a blog post.
The title won’t be removed from sale, and players will still be able to create, share, and play within Dreams, but there won’t be any more updates, or developer-led events such as the Impy Awards that rewarded the community’s best creations. Long-promised multiplayer support will not be happening, and the game won’t be updated for PlayStation 5 or PlayStation VR 2.
Dreams will also be migrating to a new server in late May, after which players will face a storage limit of 5GB for new creations “in an effort to preserve the security and stability of the Dreams server for all players.” Existing creations uploaded before the move won’t count toward this limit. A number of other features will be removed from the game, including Twitch integration.
Media Molecule promised that it would continue to highlight the community’s best Dreams creations on its social channels, and to surface creations through in-game curation, even after live service ends.
In a FAQ, the studio implied that Dreams had not been successful enough to be worked on further into the future, even though the developers would have liked to. “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,” it said. It also confirmed that its new project is not Dreams 2 or related to the Dreams IP.
“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,” the studio said. “Thank you for being part of it with us – we look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.”
