Dune: Awakening devs don't expect to keep launch player numbers

Gamesradar: Dune: Awakening had a more devastating downfall than a Russian tsar, with the MMO reaching an incredible 189,333 peak player count on Steam back in 2025 and spending the cold months since then collecting only a fraction of that – about 10,000 players a day.

But developer Funcom is sort of at peace with it. Lead producer Ole Andreas and senior content manager Tor Egil discuss this with FRVR in a new interview about Dune: Awakening. "It is a live game, and it's a natural thing to see the cycles." Egil explains, "It's overall hard to expect to keep launch player numbers for a super long time, that's always going to be hard." That said, Dune's fresh Chapter 3 is oriented around clawing players back.

Dune: Awakening Chapter 3 is "not going to please everyone," but it's only the start of many changes for the survival MMO – including melee tweaks, an endgame PvE overhaul, and private servers.