5 years after we called this Kickstarted MMO ‘a giant fiasco’ and just 3 months after it finally launched, it’s shutting down

The sandbox MMO DreamWorld raised almost $65,000 on Kickstarter in 2021—not nearly enough to fund much of anything in the way of a videogame, let alone an “infinite open world MMO” that promised to host millions of players and thousands of biomes on a single shared world. But it had the backing of startup investor Y Combinator, and development did move ahead, culminating in an early access release on Steam in March, five years after its crowdfunding campaign. And now, it’s closing.

There was trouble with DreamWorld right from the start. In a deep dive into the game shortly after the beginning of post-Kickstarter alpha testing, we wrote that it had immediately turned into a giant fiasco. The developers had no real experience in making games, the project allegedly made use of stolen or improperly credited assets, servers were poorly secured and easily hackable, and the whole thing was impossibly ambitious, to the point that some accused it of being a scam.

It all became academic when DreamWorld touched down on Steam on March 10. As recorded by SteamDB, it launched to an all-time peak concurrent player count of 56 and quickly tailed off from there to, at this particular moment, a flat zero. User reviews—36 of them as I write this—are “mixed,” and while even some of the negative reviews say DreamWorld shows occasional glimmers of promise, I think this one, from Steam user Dekawar, cuts closest to the overall vibe: “I do not think this is a scam but it has a ways to go before i would call it a game.”

At this point, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, as a brief Steam update posted over the weekend (via Delisted Games) says it’s going away. “DreamWorld is being retired from Steam Early Access and removed from sale,” the update states. “The game relies on hosted online services, and those services are being shut down. As a result, online and server-dependent functionality will no longer be available.

“There are no in-game purchases, premium currency, or paid in-game items that require additional action from players.”

DreamWorld is a premium-priced game, selling for $30/£25/€29, so refunds on that front will presumably be dependent on whether or not you’re within Steam’s guidelines. If you ponied up on Kickstarter—and some people plowed a lot of money into it—you’re just out of luck.

There’s no indication of when the shutdown will happen, but it might have already happened—or may even be in the process of happening. Rather like the launch, the closure is turning into a mess too: Users in the DreamWorld Discord reported that the account servers had gone down last week; the game itself is (or at least was) still up and playable, but accounts couldn’t be created, changed, or recovered. According to one of the Discord mods, at least some of the DreamWorld leadership were also unaware of the shutdown message until they were notified about it earlier today.

So it’s possible that DreamWorld isn’t actually going to be shuttered imminently, although functionally I’m not sure that makes much difference given that literally nobody is playing it right now. Also notable, I think, is that, aside from a small patch a few days after it went live, the shutdown message is the first update to DreamWorld on Steam since it launched. I’m keeping my eyes open for further updates but at this point, I think it’s fair to say the curtain has indeed fallen on DreamWorld.

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