“Tutorials are part of Dreams, they’re interactive and walk you through everything step by step, so I didn’t need to keep rummaging through a million searches to find specifically what I needed. There’s no industry jargon, so the terminology is simple and easy to understand, and you can just hover your cursor over literally any of the tools for a short and simple explanation of its function or uses. Granted, now that I’ve had more experience with Dreams, I feel a lot more confident about re-visiting and committing to something like Unity.”

So how about that Ko-Fi and PayPal link? That’s some smart thinking. 

“Yeah, I don’t think there’s many of us doing that donation stuff in Dreams. I’ve seen one other person who’s using Dreams to create music do it.”

Anthony stated he was hesitant about doing it at first, but some mates of his outside of the Dreams community pushed him into doing it. Presumably, after seeing how much time he was putting into his creations. 

“I don’t think there are really many negatives to doing it! I don’t see why other creators shouldn’t do it if they don’t want to. I think it’ll only become an issue if people somehow start locking content behind a donation, that would defeat the whole purpose of Dreams (and I’m sure there’s probably some legal issues there too)”

In the year since Dreams released one of the hottest topics has been around the user-generated content module. ‘Is Media Molecule profiting off the work of others?’ An easy middle ground for that is for more creators to simple start including links for Ko-Fi or PayPal inside their games. 

As for how successful his donations have been, Anthony says he definitely won’t be living off of them anytime soon, but he appreciates every single dollar nonetheless.

“The first dollar that someone sent immediately made it successful for me. Like, that dollar could be a frozen coke at Maccas, and someone bought that for me from across the world for just doing something I find fun in my spare time. It’s cliche and cheesy but the also emotional aspect, the idea that ‘someone liked something I made so much that they were willing to send money is also incredibly humbling and gratifying.”

Anthony hasn’t been keeping track of exactly how much he’s received across the two tip-jars, but he thinks he’s received more than enough to have paid for his copy of Dreams.

“I’m certain I can say I’ve received enough donations to recoup the money I initially spent on Dreams in the first place. In a way, it’s like the Dreams community has now bought me a copy of Dreams, which allowed me to make The Snowgardens for them haha. It’s a nice thought.”

A handful of Dreams games including The Snowgardens have felt like complete enough experiences that I’d have happily paid a couple of dollars to buy the game off somewhere like the iOS store. Anthony told me he’d love to be able to export The Snowgardens to places like the PlayStation Store, or Steam. But he also brought up several examples of why it would get legally, and logically tricky. 

“I think [Dreams] open market, the collaboration, the ability to just use whatever is super important to what Dreams is. And then there’s also all the copyright issues. Because you can use other people’s creations in your creation in Dreams (if the author allows it), exporting something and calling it yours (even if it includes assets from someone else) would have a whole lot of copyright/legal issues. If I made a whole set of assets and someone went and used them all in a game, and then exported and sold it, potentially without me even knowing, that would obviously suck.”

Dreams currently lets you mix and match other creators assets to your liking if they set them for public use, and most people do because there’s little reason not to do so. Of course, if money was on the table that would change quickly, and that’s understandable. Anthony did pitch another version of Dreams where you can’t re-mix other peoples content and noted that it takes away what makes Dreams so special and unique. 

It’s sad to see that the games created within Dreams are currently the only creations stuck within the confines of the PlayStation system. There have been two successful cases of people creating music and a short film within Dreams, to then release them outside the confines of the Dreamverse.

Creator Byvsen has released two albums of music developed within Dreams under Green Guy that you can listen to on Spotify right now. 

And then you have Noguchi’s Bell, which is a full animated short film you can watch on Youtube. It was created within Dreams, and it looks insanely good.