Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Dreams, the Playstation 4 exclusive from Media Molecule, is a virtual world creation platform with what look to be some of the most impressive and user-friendly creation tools on the market, incredible user-generated content like this, and has at least nearly 1.4 million user accounts. (According to this Media Molecule account, which new users auto-follow when they create an account on the platform.)

What Dreams doesn't yet have, vexingly, is many active users.  As I write this, there's less than 1,500 concurrent users in-game. (By contrast, there's currently about 15,000 and 2,000 concurrent users in VRChat and RecRoom, respectively, on Steam alone.)

Why? To some extent, the very fact that VRChat and RecRoom have become so popular is likely sucking the air out of other user-generated virtual world platforms like Dreams — especially when those worlds are free-to-play and Dreams costs $20. This recent-ish feature from Kotaku may have some other hints:

Meanwhile, when asked what they’d improve, most [Dreams creators] singled out the way in which the ‘Dreams’ are curated. Besides MMPicks—Media Molecule’s personal selection of the best creations to play—the Dreams home page is often dominated by low quality and unfinished meme creations, which typically receive far more attention and likes. There are a few reasons why these might be so popular, but it’s mostly because of their use of established intellectual property. People are far more likely to click on something featuring characters from Shrek, Fall Guys, or whatever else is popular in meme culture, than trying out something new by an unknown creator. This can obviously be pretty demoralizing for other creators who spend weeks and months working on original projects…

Another problem with Dreams may be how it has been marketed. For those put off or intimidated by creation engines, it’s hard to know what the game offers without already being embedded in the community. This makes it hard to justify the cost for non-creators, even in spite of the game’s now-discounted price (It’s going for $20 at many retailers). After an initial marketing push, it appears Sony has deprioritized Dreams, leaving it to Media Molecule to grow its community organically through updates and social media posts, as opposed to advertisements or sponsorship deals. A situation that seems guaranteed to reach the creators and not the players.

Offhand, I'd say Dreams still has great prospects to find a fanbase: Make it free to play or near free-to-play (i.e. $5 or less, versus $20), add some ROBLOX achievement/rating mechanics, and with such a great creative community, it could become very popular, very quickly.

Hat tip: Dreams creator Martin Nebelong who creates amazing Dreams experiences like this (above).