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.
