Indie Open World MMO DreamWorld Launches $10K Kickstarter, Fully-Funded In Just 9 Hours
DreamWorld Realities has launched a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of their procedural-generated open-world MMO DreamWorld, which the developers say is “the last game you’ll ever play. “
The three-man indie studio touts the game as an infinite single open-world MMO with thousands of unique biomes that can support millions of players. Players will also have the ability to freely sculpt the game world to their liking with a massive catalog of objects.
“The vision is that DreamWorld is the endgame,” said Chief Creative Officer Zachary Kaplan. “Every genre, every style, every game type there has been and will be, all in one world, built by each player, on the back of accessible and powerful modular user interfaces. Think Zbrush, Photoshop, and Sketchup but in-game and easier.”
DreamWorld Realities is made up of two full-time and one part-time developer. Kaplan explained that the idea for the game came at a low point in his life, having just lost his job because of COVID-19 and his fiancé leaving him soon after.
“I moved back in with my parents in California, and started turning my life around,” he recalled. “My best friend Garrison, a workaholic programmer, started calling every day trying to cheer me up. We’d chat about things we’d enjoyed together in high school, and for us, gamers since we could walk, it was always gaming.
The two then proceeded to create the game they’ve always wanted to play. His best friend quit his job and they started working on the game every waking hour adding more features to the game every week.
“DreamWorld went from a whitebox test level, to a small island, to a massive world where players could collect resources, chop down trees, fly, combat one another, and build anything they could imagine,” said Kaplan.
When asked how they can possibly develop a game of that scope with just $10,000 when other MMOs raised millions and still failed to deliver a game, Kaplan responded with this:
“I can't speak to CoE's experience, I'm not sure why they weren't able to succeed. What I do know is that our approach was to get our technology developed first as our foundation so that we knew we could build whatever we came up with on top of it. Garrison has been working as what you could consider an 'infrastructural' engineer for Google, Apple, Facebook, and others for the better part of the last decade, and friends and consultants we're working with have similar experience. We've built our base level off of that expertise, so we're confident in our technology. My job is to put an exciting world and player experience on top of it, and that I can promise we'll also do in spades! 🙂 We're also backed by YCombinator, so we're building community and trying to expand our team faster with Kickstarter!”
The game’s Kickstarter was fully-funded in just 9 hours and has raised nearly three times their funding goal as of this writing with 21 days left in the campaign. Only time will tell whether DreamWorld will truly become the last game we’ll ever play or if it’ll join the growing list of failed Kickstarter MMOs.
