Dune Awakening has been delayed from its intended May 15 release date, pushed back by just under a month to June 10. This comes following feedback from its closed beta testers, who have led Funcom conclude it needs “a bit more time to cook”.
This sudden announcement was posted on social media platforms for the game including Twitter for eager players to find, and makes the bitter taste of bad news a little easier to swallow with the announcement of a large scale beta weekend next month to get more people in! This is a no-brainer decision, as Funcom will have surely paid for server space during the month of May that would otherwise be left barren…like Dune.
This news obviously sucks for those eager to play the game (and maybe even write a few guides on it), but as anyone who has played an MMO at launch will tell you, it’s the first few days that matter most to curious players. If they log in for the launch and the game has issues, be it server stability or technical faults, or just too many visual bugs, players will turn it off and never boot it up again.
This can impact even the hardiest of MMO IPs – some of you may remember the launch experience for World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, which was a bad start to an already rough expansion, turning off many.
An important update regarding Dune: Awakening:
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— Dune: Awakening (@duneawakening.com) 15 April 2025 at 15:14
If there is a silver lining, it’s that the beta next month will give the team a decent idea of the appetite for Dune Awakening on launch, and allow it to adjust server capacity accordingly. That’s about it. But it’s still probably a good move, and one that’ll hurt the team too. You only got to look at Path of Exile 2’s last minute delay, which cost them over a million dollars, to know these decisions can’t be made hamfistedly.
Let us know what you think below! Was this the right call?
