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The thing is YOU had the ability to talk to Mm developers. The average creator does not, including me.

I don't disagree. Not everyone is lucky enough to live within a reasonable distance of a game convention that Mm have gone to, nor do all have the means to afford it. I'm not ignorant of this, though my comment was not intended as a boast. I merely stated this as justification for my assertion that the developers are passionate about Dreams and I hoped this would be cheering news to anyone who fears that the developers in fact don't care to work on it. In the face of a number of unsubstantiated statements I thought I would set a good example and attempt to provide some basis for my optimistic rebuttal. Admittedly, simply acknowledging the team's passion is a weak argument (no amount of passion would stand up in the face of a publisher like Sony pulling the plug) but it's all I can offer and it seemed like a positive point in that context. 

 

I'm sure all of them are passionate but that doesn't negate the fact that actual updates for this game are few and far between. 

Again, I don't disagree. Where we don't seem to match up is in that I feel like the intermissions between updates are understandable, expected, typical, acceptable. It's going to take a long time to see all the things that Mm have promised. Mm are between a rock and a hard place. If they tell us what they're working on, like multiplayer, they get daily abuse from people who want it now. If they don't tell us what they're working on, they get daily abuse from people who think the game is dead, or that Mm is not communicating with their paying customers. There is no happy medium. By all means — and here I address any naysayer, not the OP in particular — express your impatience with the slow pace of development or communication of such, but try to avoid voicing any fears about the cessation of development until evidence of such emerges. I think that's unhelpful.

 

All that said, and moving on to other points in the thread, I would enjoy seeing more information about development progress, but I certainly don't feel any entitlement to it, so I accept my moderate disappointment in this regard. I do have the benefit of being a very patient man. My window on the community is a relatively positive one, probably due to the fact that I've basically curated my own twitter timeline of some of the more creative and interesting Dreamers, so I don't see any of these toxic youngsters with their online spats about 'garbage' content. 

Comparisons with Roblox do intrigue me. Roblox was first released in 2006, after a period of beta. Being free-to-play gave it a massive numbers advantage over Dreams, but its financial model is built on microtransactions. If Dreams never goes down the microtransactions route, I'll be grateful! But from our lofty perspective of fifteen years later, it's clear both what can be achieved by developing something over such a long period of time as long as you keep at it, and what a long time it can take to add new features. It took over six years before iOS support was added. Ten years for VR support. Over that time, its developers have grown and grown, from a handful of staff to over a thousand! That's over ten times the size of Mm at the moment. There's no reason to believe Dreams can hope to be anywhere near as successful but for the time being I'm happy to watch Dreams' 'ten-year plan' unfold at its own pace. I know nothing of the Roblox community. I wonder if they had periods in the early years when people were desperately clamouring for updates?

 

What form will 'Multiplayer' take when it finally arrives? Dreams was built, as far as I understand it, for four-player multiplayer. At one point I remember Alex Evans teased the possibility of there maybe being as many as eight players but even then he immediately down-played this as a nice-to-have, not especially likely. I wonder how many of the people waiting desperately for the Multiplayer update recognise the four-player limit as a strong possibility? This is what has been promised.

It's my opinion that if the original plan for four-player online multiplayer is still the goal, then its development is getting on the long side. I would like to think — and I must stress that this is purest speculation with no basis in fact — that maybe Mm have taken a step back and looked at how they could increase this limit. That would easily account for the length of time taken to develop this feature. Then again, it may be wishful thinking. Wishful thinking that means I'd probably be disappointed if Multiplayer eventually releases with the long-promised four-player maximum, though I know I'd have no basis for complaint.