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It's honestly quite shocking to see how dominant the old content is while new content struggles to garner attention. I skimmed through a small sample size of games ranging from popular to award winners, all from various years, and checked their new player counts for this week. Already well established titles are still pulling dozens and sometimes 100+ player counts a day. Now compare that to 2022 with high profile titles like Trip's Voyage: it struggles to match those numbers despite the massive difference in quality. Rest of 2022 titles are lucky to get dozens of plays daily once their 4 week exposure is over; 2021 is pretty much dead with single digit numbers, with very few exceptions like Bat's Tale (thankfully) able to consistently get dozens of player counts daily.

I wonder if it has to do with how the game recommends stuff when searching that's causing this issue. Searching for stuff when launching the game fills the recommended feed with old, already well known titles. Searching for something specific is also a problem. Example: The Backrooms concept is still popular, and  The Backrooms - Threshold was able to ride that trend successfully this year to gain thousands of likes/plays quickly, and it even spawned several other successful episodes. Despite all that, when you search for "backrooms" on Dreams, you get this old one from early access as the top recommended and Threshold is nowhere in sight. Filter the search to trending and you get random stuff. It's only when you do most thumbed up that Threshold finally appears.

So while all the playlists and Mm picks are nice to boost a dream for the short term, in the long term they'll fade in the background because the old content continues to siphon new players. New players who may have already seen said content from the YouTube videos and streams showcasing those games from launch, thus giving the impression that content is running dry on Dreams.