Imagine an MMORPG that rolled every game genre into one incredible universe—a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame

This MMO that promised an 'infinite open world' has become a giant fiasco

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2021-05-28 19:30:02

Imagine an MMORPG that rolled every game genre into one incredible universe—a game for the ages that lets you craft, build, farm, fight, play, tame creatures, and do whatever you want. The wildly ambitious promise of the ultimate mixed-genre MMO has been made before, but now we have a new contender that claims to be the "last game you'll ever play"—DreamWorld, an "infinite open world creative MMO" that will, at some point, host millions of players in a single immersive world.

You don't have to be a game developer to know that this isn't a game you can make today, even with a massive budget. And when you learn that DreamWorld's creators, Garrison Bellack and Zachary Kaplan, have never made a commercial game, it looks like pure fantasy. Yet this fantasy raised almost $65,000 on Kickstarter in March and has the backing of startup investor Y Combinator. As I looked further into this impossibly ambitious project, I found MMO streamers calling DreamWorld and its May 21st alpha release a "fiasco" and a "scam," and that was just the beginning. The allegations against DreamWorld include:

On DreamWorld's Discord server, Kaplan said that his claim of "nine years" of game development experience is in personal projects—Flash games, "some work in Unity," and documentation relating to DreamWorld. Kaplan is an entrepreneur and self-described marketer whose startup experience seems to consist of a wearable Bluetooth speaker called Core Aegis. Bellack, the engineer/coder of the pair, has Apple, Facebook, and Google listed on his resume.