Dune: Awakening falls just shy of Steam's top 100 as it nets 142,000 players on its first proper launch day

Dune: Awakening erythrite crystals - A close-up shot of a masculine character with a thick beard looking up slightly.

(Image credit: Funcom)

It's Dune June and Funcom's new survival MMO—Dune: Awakening—is finally here. Actually, it's been here since June 5, when people who forked over for its advanced access version got into the game, but now it's really here: Funcom is letting the hoi polloi in, even those who spent a mere $50 on it. What's the world coming to?

Unsurprisingly, Dune: Awakening hit its highest-ever concurrent player peak in the immediate aftermath of its full launch, topping out at 142,050 players at the same time on June 10. It's still going strong: at time of writing, 110,000 players are skipping about Arrakis.

I'm curious to see how high it'll go. As I wrote in my Dune: Awakening preview several hundred years ago (January), it's the first and only survival-y, crafting-y game to actually capture and hold my attention, and I reckon I'm not alone in that. Our Chris Livingston has been enjoying the game in his Dune review in progress, and even our online editor Fraser Brown—avowed enemy of survival games—is enjoying himself when he's not going slowly mad in an endless dungeon.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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