"We cannot sustain the size and structure required during peak development."
Norwegian developer Funcom, creator of Dune: Awakening and Conan Exiles - and many other games - is entering a period of restructuring and bracing for layoffs as a result. You may remember the company making a similar move this time last year, months after the initial PC release of Dune: Awakening.
Funcom is also appointing a new CEO, as long-time leader Rui Casais leaves the company after 22 years - with 11 as its leader - and Scott Junior steps into the role, having been at the company for 25 years and steered Dune: Awakening to market as executive producer.
The need to restructure follows the end of major development work on Dune: Awakening. Now that the console versions have been released - they arrived 22nd September with a new single-player mode - Funcom moves into live service operation mode, which seems not to require a development team as large.
"Dune: Awakening has been the biggest project we have ever undertaken, requiring many years of significant development resources across our studios," said Rui Casais in a press release. "Moving from full production into long-term post-launch development and operations requires a different organisation.
"While we would have wanted everyone who helped build Dune: Awakening to continue with us, we cannot sustain the size and structure required during peak development as we move into this next phase. My focus now is ensuring the process is as supportive as possible for everyone affected, and to treat our colleagues with the respect and transparency they deserve."
The press release noted that this will mean "a period of restructuring" for Funcom, and "reducing the size of the organisation", which yes, means "saying goodbye to valued colleagues". That process begins "now". Our thoughts are with the people affected.
As to Dune: Awakening and Conan Exiles' futures, Funcom said it remains "committed" to "supporting, expanding, and growing these games and their communities for years to come". The company pointed to the recent release of Conan Exiles' Enhanced edition and said it would continue to expand upon that.
Dune: Awakening initially launched last June on PC, billed then as an ambitious merging of survival game and massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The gist is that you're a desert-living person in the world of Dune, eking out a life for yourself on the sands, while avoiding the bloody massive sandworms that will eat you if you're not careful. Connor reviewed Dune: Awakening at the time and was really impressed.
Since its launch, however - which was big but numbers soon depleted - Funcom has set about making the game a more traditional survival game experience, enabling private servers and eventually, with the game on console, a single-player mode where you don't have to interact with other people at all. Funcom announced recently that 1 million "new survivors" had made the game their home, but that doesn't necessarily equate to sales as it's a Game Pass game as well.
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