‘This is not our first rodeo’: Dune: Awakening team confident servers won’t implode at launch

It’s something we’ve seen happen so many times previously it’s now an expected part of gaming: the launch of a highly-anticipated multiplayer game and the immediate failure of that game’s servers to handle the massive influx of players on day one.

Survival MMO Dune: Awakening has a weekend beta beginning tomorrow and a full launch planned for June 10. Will it suffer the same server issues as so many other games before it? Developer Funcom wants to preemptively settle your nerves.

“We’ve seen several comments expressing concerns about server load and queues,” Funcom said in a post on Steam. “We certainly expect heavy loads at launch, and that is why we are preparing accordingly.”

Noting that full servers are “impossible to completely avoid,” the developer said “there will be thousands of servers grouped together in hundreds of Worlds available at launch,” spread out across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, adding that it’ll be able to “spin up more” servers if necessary.

“This is not our first rodeo, we’ve launched several MMOs and survival games over the past 25 years, and we have a robust set of tools and processes in place, managed by an experienced live operations team,” Funcom said.

I love the confidence, but I feel like I’ve heard other developers and publishers claim they have systems in place that can handle things if more players show up than expected. And to my memory, no matter how good the plan is for day one, things can and usually do go awry.

In fact, day one server woes seem to be getting more common instead of less over time. We even deemed 2024 “the year of server issues” because it happened again and again: the launch of a big game followed by players gnashing their teeth because they couldn’t get online. We saw it with games like Helldivers 2, Last Epoch, Palworld, Nightingale, and Microsoft Flight Simulator: they all quickly faltered under the strain of a massive influx of players and had to scramble to get the problems fixed.

That can take time. It was a couple of weeks before Helldivers 2 sorted itself out. Microsoft Flight Simulator was completely unplayable for nearly everyone for its entire launch day. Last Epoch had been playable in early access for years and was still caught off guard when one of its services unexpectedly failed during its 1.0 launch.

Even with a plan in place, Funcom is already warning players of potential issues, particularly one that every player dreads: “you will join a server queue when logging in” if a player concurrency cap is reached, Funcom said.

Funcom also suggests maybe that isn’t a bad thing? “Commonly, survival games don’t offer this, and you are left having to wait and hope you are able to click fast enough when a slot opens up,” Funcom said. “By adding a server queue functionality, you can simply click once and rest easy knowing that you will get in when a slot becomes available to you.”

We’ll see how the beta goes this weekend: Funcom has released “tens of thousands” of beta keys which sounds like a healthy amount for a real stress test. But even that probably won’t come close to the full launch in June, which could attract potentially hundreds of thousands of players. Even if it’s not your first rodeo, you can still get thrown off your horse.