Dune: Awakening developer Funcom announces redundancies

Funcom, the Oslo-based studio behind the recently released Dune: Awakening, has announced it will be laying off staff.

In a statement sent to GamesIndustry.biz, the developer said that the open-world survival game was “the biggest release we’ve had in our 32-year long history of making great games,” before indicating that staff members are to be let go as part of a studio restructuring.

“The game has already shown incredible potential,” the statement said, “and the right way forward is to focus our internal resources on releasing new content, features, and enhancements.

“The transition from development to long-term live operation, while also building towards a major console release next year, will require us to restructure our teams and focus our resources from across projects and studios. Unfortunately, this also means having to say goodbye to cherished colleagues.

“This difficult process is starting now, and we cannot yet determine the exact impact. We are working to find new opportunities for those affected.

“Our focus now is to provide these team members with the support and guidance they need, and we ask for your understanding at this time as we will not make further comments during this process.”

No indication was given as to the number of employees who might be affected.

Dune: Awakening was Funcom’s fastest ever selling game, reaching one million players around two weeks after its launch in June. It’s currently not clear what Funcom’s “major console release” for next year will be.

Funcom was acquired by the Chinese video game giant Tencent in 2020. Yong-yi Zhu, VP and head of business operations, strategy, and compliance at Tencent Games, talked about working with Funcom in a recent GamesIndustry.biz interview.

“They have their own internal expertise, they published games in the past, they have a development team, but at the same time, they have never launched a game of this scale,” he said.

“So we had our tech teams go and visit Funcom and sit there and work with them on backend technology, on servers and things like that, to make sure everything was stable. And also we can help them scale in that regard.

“And then on publishing, they had expertise in certain geographies, and for us, we had expertise in others, so we partnered together to figure out how we reach more of an audience across the world.”

When asked whether Tencent planned to scale back its interests in Western studios, Zhu replied: “We have no plans at the moment to pull out. You may see a reduction in investment in certain places, and I think part of that is just the realities of the industry and the dynamics of the industry.”