Realizing your big-budget, high-risk online game is coming out at the same time as the most anticipated new console in half a decade can’t be a great feeling. But I bet discovering that nearly one hundred thousand people played it at the same time anyway, almost a week before it’s officially released, made all the dread worthwhile. Dune Awakening, Funcom’s MMO-cum-survival game, is proving astonishingly popular, despite some hefty competition.
Making an MMO in 2025 seems brave in and of itself. Funcom has had a mixed history with the format, from the story-focused Anarchy Online and Secret World Legends to the more widely successful Conan Exiles, but it’s been a long seven years since the company created a new game. Dune Awakening, born admidst the popularity of Denis Villeneuve’s movies, picks up what Conan put down (then pushed around in a big circle for years), expanding on the mix of crafting and survival simulation set in a massively multiplayer world.
The game is officially out on June 10, but the scourge of “Advanced Access” means that those who buy a more expensive version of the unreviewed game can start playing before anyone has the chance to tell them if it’s worth their money. And how. Last night saw over 93,000 people playing simultaneously, and that number has already picked back up to 55k at the time of writing, as the Western world wakes up once again.
Funcom has been a little bit canny here. Usually, Advanced Access on PC is a benefit you only get if you fork out the cash for some kind of “special edition” that sees the cost of a game soar above its vanilla $60 launch price, likely hitting $90 to $100. However, in the case of Dune Awakening, prices started lower. People playing today likely bought the Deluxe Edition that’s “only” $70, still a significant bump over the $50 the game will cost you on Tuesday, but certainly more enticing to larger crowds, and does include the season pass. Then there’s an Ultimate Edition, at $90, to make sure the big spenders still have somewhere to throw away their cash: on top of playing the game earlier, you’ll also get four in-game dress-up assets and a digital artbook and soundtrack.
That more sensible pricing structure is likely a big part of why the game is performing so extraordinarily well ahead of full launch, and hopefully will get noticed by those who believe that increasing prices is the only way to make more money. Bang a drum with me: Larger. Numbers. Of. People. Can. Afford. Lower. Prices.
It’ll be very interesting to see if the game sustains this kind of player population, and whether it can smash even these splendid numbers on official release. Games like Dune Awakening are make-or-break on launch (or at least have a monstrous hill to climb should it go badly), and given that the 100k who showed up last night all went in pretty blind (they may have played a beta, but still), not knowing if they would find a game that’s up to standard, it remains to be seen what the consensus will be. It’s currently sitting on 84 percent positive reviews, from almost 4,000 people, so not too shabby.
This is all the more impressive considering it was done against the backdrop of the Switch 2 arriving in everyone’s homes. Sure, the Venn circles might not have the biggest overlap between PC multiplayer survival players and Nintendo fanciers, but given the Switch 2 now has mouse controls...It really demonstrates that gaming is a far broader church than people usually credit, with plenty of room for vast amounts of variety to be simultaneously successful.
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