Articles & Essays

Dune: Awakening Just Proved Its Other Players Were Optional

Red Warden MythrilWorksSeptember 25, 20265 min readdune awakening, game design, single-player, always-online, local-first

Funcom retrofitted a full single-player mode into an online survival game built around other players. If they came out that cleanly, what were they doing there?

On September 22, Funcom shipped Dune: Awakening to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, day one on Game Pass, fifteen months after the PC launch. The same release put a full single-player mode on every platform, PC included: the whole story through the end of Book One, the Deep Desert, three difficulty presets, and a manual panel for tuning harvest rates, experience gain, base decay and sandworm spawns (Funcom).

Funcom announced all of it back in June, and it calls single-player one of the most-requested features since launch (Funcom press release).

That's the news. It's a release-date story, and most of the coverage treated it like one.

First, this is not a flop being rescued. The PC version launched in June 2025 and sold a million copies in roughly two weeks, the fastest-selling game Funcom has ever made (IGN). Steam concurrents peaked around 189,000 that month (SteamCharts). Critics landed it at 78 on Metacritic.

Then came the curve every online survival game knows. By late 2025 the monthly average on Steam was down in the single thousands, and through 2026 it has sat somewhere between about 4,500 and 8,700 (SteamCharts). That's a healthy niche game. It's also a fraction of the launch.

And Funcom did not sit on it. Over the year it made PvP optional, rebuilt the endgame, added base and vehicle backups so a break doesn't cost you your stuff, removed base taxes, and let PC players self-host servers for free. CEO Rui Casais calls the September release the result of over a year of work (Funcom press release). That's a studio listening, not a studio coasting.

The hook isn't the console port. It's that a game built around a shared world - scarcity, territory, a Deep Desert that storms reshaped every week and hundreds of players fought over - now ships a mode with nobody else in it. In single-player the Deep Desert never resets, your buildings are never wiped, and the Coriolis storm is toned down.

Here are the limits, stated up front. This doesn't prove multiplayer was worthless. Official servers still run, and the PvP Deep Desert still exists, paying 2.5 times the resource yield for the risk (Funcom). And one detail matters more than the rest: in single-player, the Landsraad - the faction war at the heart of the endgame - simulates other players to keep the competition alive. In one place, Funcom had to fake the crowd. Hold onto that. It's the most useful fact in the whole release.

The consensus writes itself: finally, single-player. It's a much better game now, go try it on Game Pass. The sharper version adds that this is what should have shipped in the first place.

Both are fair. The people saying "finally" asked for this for a year, specifically and loudly, and they got it. The complaints about a PvP-heavy endgame were real and Funcom took them seriously. If you bounced off Arrakis in 2025, this is a genuinely different game to come back to.

But that take stops at "good news." It never asks the follow-up.

The follow-up is sitting in Funcom's own April developer update: over 80% of lifetime players engaged exclusively with PvE content (Funcom, April 2026). Funcom's console announcement now puts it at 80 to 90 percent (Funcom).

Read that again. The idea the whole design was organized around - other players as the threat, the competition, the reason to build walls - was something four out of five players never touched. Not after they got bored of it. Ever.

So for most of the audience, the shared world wasn't a design decision. It was a default. For the 10 to 20 percent who wanted it, it was the game. For everyone else it was the tax, and a year of complaints about the endgame was the bill arriving.

Give Funcom full credit for the next part: they found this out because they measured it, and then they spent a year undoing it. Most studios in that position ship more content on top of the default. Funcom changed the default.

Where I'd push is on why it took a year of telemetry to learn. The answer is that always-online is where online survival games start, not where they arrive. Nobody has to argue for it in the pitch meeting. You only have to argue for leaving it.

And the Landsraad detail tells you exactly where the line was. The one system that really needed other players, Funcom had to simulate. Everything else just came out. The part you have to fake was the design. The part that comes out clean was the default.

I've made this call myself, in software, in the other direction, on purpose. LLypses is a desktop app. You bring your own keys, and nothing forces you through my cloud.

The moment I decided that was when I tried to add image-gen inside of our first product: LLypses. It was an impressive feature to add on to the already impressive features of the app. The only problem was to satisfy our MOR, we would need to send every query from a user’s machine back to the MOR to verify the customer was not generating anything unsavory. At the end of the day, that goes against EVERYTHING I wanted to achieve. The only real answer was to delete image-gen until I could figure out a solution that did not involve my customer’s data being sent off their machine. .

Here's the uncomfortable part. Funcom had the one thing I gave up: a number. They knew 80-plus percent of players lived in PvE because they could see it. I can't see that.

That's the trade in both directions. Default toward the network and you get excellent data about a choice you already made. Default away from it and you give up the data - but you never spend a year digging yourself out.

If you build anything - a game, an app, a tool, a service - there's a default in it you didn't choose. Always-online. Account required. Cloud sync on. A subscription where a purchase would do. Every one of them showed up because that's where the category starts, not because someone argued for it.

Here's a test you can run on your own product today. Imagine removing the default. What would you have to fake to keep the thing working? Whatever you'd have to simulate is load-bearing - that's design, keep it. Whatever comes out clean was a default, and somebody is paying for it. Usually not you.

Sometimes the answer really is the players. Often it's the business model wearing a design justification.

Funcom did the expensive, right thing, late. The lesson isn't "single-player good." It's that a default should have to earn its place the same way a feature does - before launch, not fifteen months after.

Make the other players opt-in until you can show they're what people bought.

← All articles & essays