Five years after its release, the PlayStation game that seems tailore-made for PC is still not on PC. Dreams, Media Molecule’s follow-up to the LittleBigPlanet games, was designed to let players create their own video games and share them with other players online.
This was a major step beyond what was possible in the LittleBigPlanet games, and it wasn’t limited in the way other creation-focused games like Super Mario Maker are. You weren’t restricted to the assets and mechanics that came with the game. You could sculpt your own assets, record your own music, write your own dialogue, and share it all with other players. Dreams had the functionality of a game engine. If players could dream it, they could build it in Dreams.
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The game was released on Valentine’s Day in 2020. That was a month before COVID lockdowns began, two months before the launch of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, four months before The Last of Us Part 2, five months before Ghost of Tsushima, and nine months before the PS5 hit store shelves. It’s safe to say that both Sony fans, and the world as a whole, had bigger concerns than whether Media Molecule’s unusual piece of software was trapped on the PS4.
Dreams Is Still Stuck On PS4
And yet, a half-decade later, it’s still trapped. Dreams stopped receiving live-service support in September 2023 — which meant that plans for online multiplayer never came to fruition. Despite support running years into the PS5 generation, Dreams never made the transition. Dreams is playable on the PS5, but one of the coolest aspects of the game was the ability to create and play others’ games in VR. That feature never made the jump to PSVR2 so, if you want to play the fullest version of the game, you need to keep your PS4 on hand.
dreams ps4
PSVR 2 has desperately needed games since it launched, Dreams players are begging for this functionality, and Sony opted to let it wither instead. I never got deep into the game myself, but I’ve followed the subreddit for years, and it’s still active. Users are uploading new work everyday, and many of them would gladly support a PSVR 2 launch. The lack of a PSVR 2 version of the game is almost disrespectful.
Sony abandoning the game on the PS4 represents a failure to understand Dreams’ core appeal. Sony apparently wanted to treat this like a live-service game, a la Destiny. But pitching Dreams as something that could reach a huge, mass audience was always foolish. Dreams was built around creation tools — that was the star of the show, not just another feature — and the subset of gamers who actually use creation tools at all is a minority.
In 2012, Roblox co-creator David Baszucki estimated that, of the 40 million hours that went into the game each month, only five to ten percent were dedicated to content creation. 12 years later, not much had changed. Fortnite, which averages 30 million active users per day, saw just 70,000 creators in all of 2024. The subsection of players who are actually going to engage with these tools long-term and learn to use them skillfully is vanishingly small.
Which is why restricting Dreams to a single platform was a major mistake. It was, and still is, an accessible game design tool, with tons of tutorials made with average players in mind. I never went deep with these tools, but I did mess around with the tutorials and found them easy to understand. But most players aren’t interested in playing a game that is focused this squarely on creation. It was never going to succeed as a ‘game’, but it could have been extremely successful as all-in-one game development software aimed at new developers.
As cool and accessible as Dreams is, most people who want to learn how to develop games are going to do that on a PC. Nearly five years into its PC push, it’s perplexing and sad that Sony never brought over the game that would benefit the most.
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