In case you missed it, yesterday Dune Awakening was delayed from its initial May 15 release date by just under a month. According to the development team at Funcom, this is so the team has “a bit more time to cook” with the game, which is now set to drop on June 10. Having played many MMOs on launch during my life online, I don’t even need to know how badly this game needs extra work. I believe this delay is a good thing.
I know that’ll be hard to hear for some of you, who like me have been fiending for the full release of Dune Awakening and all the hijinks that’ll surely go down. Many players, early adopters who have been giving the game a go during various closed betas, have already formed communities. Houses have been pre-planned and are ready to go, player-built factions already prepped for the incoming wave of new players fresh to the sands of Arrakis.
But even those players, who I assume are among the most disappointed with the news, should understand the importance of an MMO’s launch day. First impressions are crucial for all games, all persistent media in fact, but I’d argue that live service games rely on establishing a stellar initial impression more than most. These are games that invite people to drop hundreds, if not thousands, of hours. They fight for attention against not only direct genre competitors, but all live service titles. Choosing to lock in and envelope yourself in Dune Awakening is a choice to not just dive into this game, but not to spend that time in other games. As such, you absolutely have to make sure folks aren’t turned away at the door.
History has shown that for live service games, if players aren’t happy in those opening days they tend to leave, probably forever. Battlefront 2 launched in 2017 and was met with an intense negative reaction from players, due to the intense grind and lootbox-based monetisation. It was only in 2019, after several major updates and system overhauls, that the game started to feel worth sinking into for many.
Looking directly at MMOs, Fallout 76 is a legendary example of a video game first impressions disaster. Packed with technical bugs, eye-watering microtransactions, and lack of human NPCs that rubbed Fallout fans the wrong way, the game too suffered drastically from a poor initial reception. Now, Bethesda would go on to say this wouldn’t put it off making multiplayer games in the future, and Todd Howard defended it as a long term project, but while it’s pretty good now, it’s safe to say the game never really reached the potential it could have had if it nailed the landing first try.
There are countless more examples. You probably know a few of them from personal experience (hell, Warlords of Draenor on launch day). Dune Awakening is releasing into similarly treacherous waters. Not only is it a highly anticipated game, but it’s also got the Dune licence attached. That means a huge number of players will probably hop on to try it out on release day, and while some will surely be willing to stick it out through rough patches, many of those casual fans will quickly refund it if met with a sketchy experience. Graphical issues, performance issues, server capacity problems…all could prove mortal wounds for the game if not handled with care.
So with this in mind, a delay to polish it and make sure everything goes smoothly is the right call, even if I don’t know just how patchwork the game’s live build is right now. This decision will have surely cost Funcom considerable cash – think about server space it’ll have paid for in May as well as any launch marketing it’ll need to rework, delay, or outright cancel. But that money, which may be considerable, is a bargain compared to the potential losses of a nightmare launch day. No one, apart from maybe the most ardent Dune haters, wants to see that.
So delay away, I say! A few weeks isn’t that long to wait, and if the game is better for it, those who do consider themselves fans of Awakening will be happier for it. You can only launch a game once, after all. Not even Amazon could get around that fact.
