It's Dune June and Funcom's new survival MMO—Dune: Awakening—is finally here. Actually, it's been here since June 5, when people who forked over for its advanced access version got into the game, but now it's really here: Funcom is letting the hoi polloi in, even those who spent a mere $50 on it. What's the world coming to?
Unsurprisingly, Dune: Awakening hit its highest-ever concurrent player peak in the immediate aftermath of its full launch, topping out at 142,050 players at the same time on June 10. It's still going strong: at time of writing, 110,000 players are skipping about Arrakis.
It's a strong showing, though it puts the game at 119 in SteamDB's all-time concurrent player rankings, just between Clair Obscur and the open beta for New World: Aeternum. So not even in the top 100. Dismal failure. Funcom should probably just pack it in.
Or not. 142,000 players online simultaneously seems pretty good for a game that hit on a Tuesday, and I'd be flabbergasted if Dune didn't easily pip that record when everyone's home this weekend.
I'm curious to see how high it'll go. As I wrote in my Dune: Awakening preview several hundred years ago (January), it's the first and only survival-y, crafting-y game to actually capture and hold my attention, and I reckon I'm not alone in that. Our Chris Livingston has been enjoying the game in his Dune review in progress, and even our online editor Fraser Brown—avowed enemy of survival games—is enjoying himself when he's not going slowly mad in an endless dungeon.
So I think this Dune thing has legs, which is kind of weird given it's a psychedelic tale about space-Algerian freedom fighters let by a warlord high out of his gourd on worm excrement, but who am I to condemn what the kids are into these days? All I know is it's a pretty fun game to drink people's blood in, and it seems over 100,000 people agree with me.
