Media Molecule only recently released Dreams into Early Access but has stated that they have been thinking about potentially allowing ways for creators of content in Dreams to possibly monetize their creations. To be clear, this is something that has probably only had very broad, preliminary discussion within Media Molecule and should be taken with a healthy helping of salt.
This news comes courtesy of an interview from Venture Beat with Abbie Heppe, Communications Manager at Media Molecule and John Beech, Dreams' Principal Designer. Dreams has a surprising amount of depth available to its creators to allow them to really flex their creative muscles and try out almost any idea that might pop into their heads. Dreams can most closely be compared to games like Little Big Planet, Project Spark, and even Drawn To Life with its focus on allowing players to essentially become rookie game developers. There are two main paths players can take when playing Dreams: the first is the path of the creator where you would be the one filling the game with your creations and second is the path of the player where you can explore those creations to your heart's content. Both paths have an obvious overlap where the creator can look for inspiration from other creators and players can themselves become inspired to take a walk down that other path and try their hand at creating something of their own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLTWPlPKBVcWMkEaqkcPUVHv6gEd8uQDu4&v=pS-WvFL0gtI
In the interview, Heppe is asked about the potentiality of allowing creators to take their creations and publish them outside of Dreams as their own standalone games. To this Heppe states:
Outside of Dreams? Right now we allow people to publish inside Dreams. People can create and publish and other people can play it and remix it. That’s all available in Dreams. Whether we allow people to do that outside of Dreams has been, actually, a big goal for the studio. It’s something we would love to do. But we need to figure out the best way to support that. Obviously if it’s published in the PlayStation store, we want it to be QA’d. We want trophies. There are all of these other elements. We’d love to do that kind of thing, but we don’t currently have a way to do it.
After that Heppe is asked if there might be a possibility of allowing creators to get paid for or monetize their creations from with the game itself. Again it seems that the idea has been talked about a small amount and it is something that they will keep discussing as the game continues through its run in Early Access. Seeing Dreams allow creators to monetize or to publish their creations as standalone games would be a very interesting and potentially game-changing move for the industry and one that we will have to, unfortunately, wait to see if it will happen at all. Finger's crossed.
