@Trajan Oh, I was not being critical of the game itself, I agree with you about the software. I am only being realistic about the game’s financial viability for 10 years — I have no idea if it will lose money, but I’m thinking about the cost of development so far .... Media Molecule has a team of over 50 people; This is their only project as far as we know since 2012; Those people are certainly being paid and don’t work for free for the last 7 years. Now add the cost of all the support for the game (albeit I’m sure a smaller team will be able to keep it going after final release) for the next 10 years. That’s a huge sum of money the game needs to create to support just the cost of development and maintenance.

Dreams has only been generating revenue since April; We don’t know sales figures but in June it was estimated that a little over 100,000 copies had been sold in Early Access. Even if we are are optimistic and say it’s tripled by now (doubtful) at 300,000 copies at $30 a piece it’s made around $9 million. Compared to the cost of 17 years of development and maintenance of the game, that’s surely a drop in the bucket. Now obviously the game is going to sell a lot more copies in the coming years at full price (maybe $60? We don’t know what it will cost) and maybe there will be DLC and other revenue sources, but it needs to still create a lot more money for Sony before they break even on costs.

Again, I’m not being critical of the game, I’ve not played it yet and it looks fabulous for what it is. But you only need to look to Drive Club and Evolution Studios to see what might happen. Drive Club sold over 2 million copies in less than 2 years and Sony still shut down Evolution Studios, presumably because they couldn’t afford to keep them open. And now, 5 years after the game’s launch, they are shutting down the Drive Club servers. They shut down Gravity Rush 2 servers in less than 2 years. Sony has shown us that they are not averse to shutting a game down if it’s not making money.

Now they have also shown that they will be patient with studios when their projects take a long time to develop (The Last Guardian, etc.) but I can’t see them supporting a game’s servers for years on end if it is not financially viable, no matter what Shuhei says. The stockholders won’t allow for that.

So yes, I hope the game makes money eventually, but it will probably need to sell a lot more than Drive Club did to keep it going to 10 years. I was planning to eventually buy it myself when it officially releases out of early access, but I’m not sure. Like I said, the public reception has been okay, but the buzz for it seems to be a little muted compared to what I was expecting.