This interview has been edited for clarity.
It was a game six years in the making, based on an iconic sci-fi novel known for its dense and intricate world-building, so it’s fair to say that while Funcom, the developers of ambitious survival MMO Dune: Awakening, understood the scale of the game they were making, they were not ready for the ardent fanbase.
The alternate-timeline take on Frank Herbert’s sci-fi universe found a large audience interested in exploring a new galaxy, scoring a positive score of 85 per cent and above, and netted a more than respectable concurrent player count of over 142,000 players on launch day to become Funcom’s fastest selling game of all time.
“We were not expecting both how often people would play, and for how long they would play. So that took us a bit by surprise, because it blew past our projections, which is both a great thing” acknowledged Scott Junior, Executive Producer of Dune: Awakening during an exclusive interview with Geek Culture at Gamescom 2025 in Cologne, Germany.
“We had tons of people around, but it also meant that there was a lot of them consuming the content faster than we thought they would be able to.”
Now that it’s been slightly over two months since the game’s release, the team at Funcom has been hard at work responding to player feedback, overcoming technical challenges, and planning the future of the game. Oh, and also the realisation that they need to roll out more content for players.
“We should have had more end game content for all of our player types, for both like PvP and PvE, and so that’s one of our big initiatives right now, is addressing the adding additional content for end game players, especially those that don’t want to engage in direct conflict,” says Junior.
Given the high visibility of a hit game, the team has been highly responsive to player feedback, making significant adjustments post-launch.
“At launch, as people were getting to the deep desert, there was a lot of conflict happening. The people who got there first already had the end-game gear after a week, and then these new players were coming in a little bit staggered, and they had less gear,” Junior explained.
To address this, the team “made some changes a couple weeks after launch, to move the PvP border north in the deep desert, so that the iron resources could still be available to people, so that they can prepare before they get to the conflict.”
Further tweaks include bringing more resources into the southern area, allowing players to gather resources in a non-competitive, non-hostile environment but even with all that they are doing, there is the challenge of making current players happy, and developing new content for incoming players in the road ahead.
“Launching a large game with hundreds of thousands of people playing at the same time is challenging. We’re really happy with how overall the experience was, but there were some isolated incidents where people couldn’t log in, or there were some traveling issues going between maps where people would lose vehicles due to some technical things,” Junior recounted.
“We’ve spent a lot of our resources looking at those edge cases and making sure that we’re resolving those so that the overall experience is good. We also had some issues with cheating and hackers… so we’ve been working with our anti-cheat partners to shore up those because we want a fair, competitive atmosphere for everybody.”
Looking ahead, the team is committed to expanding the game’s story and features. The team’s live service strategy is to produce content for the story and side stories at the same time, and to expand the survival features of the game within these new stories.
The first major update, Chapter Two, is set to launch on 10 September, focusing on early to mid-game players and introducing new adventures and quest hubs.
“At launch, we had two acts… Then we’re starting to act three with a new update, and that’s the great convention, and the player is going to start being introduced to more of the lore characters that they might have seen in the movies or in the books.”
But even with all the planned expansion, one of the pillars for Dune: Awakening still remains – to make it an approachable survival game.
“When we looked through all the mechanics of survival games, a lot of them are very difficult, or they’re opaque on how you need to progress… We also wanted to introduce a narrative element into survival games, and I think we’ve done a really good job with that, with the storyline,” Junior said.
“We have a storyline that guides you through 90% of the difficult to understand parts as an onboarding and then that allows us to take what is traditionally a somewhat hardcore genre with survival and make it more approachable or accessible.”
Players have surprised the team with their creativity, especially with the building system. “We’ve run a couple of building contests… Using those four [building sets] with our building system, they’ve created just absolutely amazing pieces. There are these gigantic towers, huge guild houses where they have individual garages for every single member. That was surprising, how much players were engaging with that and the unique things they were creating,” Junior shared.
And once chapter two is done, there’s the next one, and of course, the planned release for the game on consoles, though the team already knows what they need to do next, including bringing back some features that had to be postponed due to production and budgeting constraints.
“One of the PvE things we wanted to do… was more discoverable points [on the Overland Map] that would dynamically show up… We ended up having to cut that due to just production budgeting and timelines. So it’s one of the things we want to bring back with chapter three,” Junior revealed.
Adapting Dune: Awakening for consoles has been a significant undertaking for the team as they have been working since pre-production and early development on the console versions. They had to stop due to budgeting reasons and had to move the console release to 2026. But after the game’s launch week in June, they have a full team working on both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox versions of the game.
The main challenge has been “decreasing the memory footprint so it runs just as well as it would run on PC, on both Sony and Microsoft’s platforms, and then updating some of the control and UI/UX. But we’re making good progress. We have the build running right now and we’re excited to bring it out to the other platforms next year.”
When asked about a feature the team is especially proud of, Junior highlighted the harvesting mini-game mechanic. “Maybe it seems very simple, but it’s our harvesting mechanic. The team did really well with the visuals and the sounds and just that harvesting activity works well. Especially when you start getting into vehicles that can start harvesting and levelling up the technique. It’s just, it’s a nice experience.”
With a dedicated team, a passionate community, and a clear vision for the future, Dune: Awakening will continue evolving and surprising its players for months and years to come.
Come this September 10th, the free Chapter 2 Update will continue the gripping narrative following the base game’s dark revelations, inviting players to uncover deeper secrets of the Imperium while encountering both new and familiar faces across fresh locations. Alongside the expanded storyline, players can enjoy a wealth of new world content ranging from contracts and dynamic encounters to unique items and activities. The update also enhances character customisation with additional options like new hairstyles, all accessible through a newly introduced re-customisation feature for existing characters.
Additionally, The Lost Harvest DLC will introduce a fully standalone storyline centered around the mysterious crash of a Miner’s Guild spice harvester, which conceals a secret cargo with the potential to reshape everything, and it’s up to the player to uncover it. Alongside this narrative expansion, the DLC adds a range of new cosmetics, including the first animated cosmetic vehicle, the Treadwheel, as well as the Dune Man building set, fresh decorations, armor sets, weapons, and more. These items, while visually distinct, offer no gameplay advantage and must be crafted like standard gear. The DLC is part of the US$24.99 Season Pass, also included in the Deluxe and Ultimate Editions of the game or it can be purchased separately at US$12.99.
Yonk is a geek who is fortunate enough to have an equally geeky Star Wars fan for a wife, who owns a LEGO Millennium Falcon encased in a glass coffee table as their home’s centre-piece.
Kevin Low
