Preface: A Real-Time Autopsy of Corporate Incompetence
Why document the undocumentable? Because someone has to, and watching Funcom fail spectacularly never gets old.
The Purpose
This series exists to chronicle, in real-time, the systematic failure of Funcom’s Dune: Awakening - not as entertainment, though it often reads that way, but as documentation of how modern game development corporations operate when divorced from competence, accountability, or basic respect for their customers.
What you’re reading isn’t traditional games journalism. It’s not advocacy, activism, or angry fan criticism. This is industrial archaeology - examining the anatomy of corporate dysfunction as it unfolds, preserving the timeline of decisions that seemed inexplicable in the moment but form clear patterns when viewed systematically.
Think of it as The Secret World but for documenting corporate disasters instead of fighting occult threats. And unlike TSW, this one won’t get abandoned after two years TROLOLOL
The Methodology
Every claim in this documentation is sourced. Every timeline is verified. Every corporate statement is preserved in context, because companies like Funcom have perfected the art of memory-holing their own promises when those promises become inconvenient.
We track three primary data streams:
- Official communications from Funcom (press releases, developer blogs, social media statements)
- Community feedback (player reports, forum discussions, content creator reactions)
- Technical evidence (gameplay footage, performance metrics, documented bugs, Steam statistics)
The goal isn’t to predict outcomes - Funcom’s patterns make their future failures inevitable. The goal is to document exactly how those failures unfold, creating a reference for anyone interested in understanding how not to develop, market, or maintain a video game.
The Context
Dune: Awakening represents something more significant than another botched game launch. It’s the intersection of several toxic trends in modern game development: the commodification of beloved intellectual properties, the prioritization of monetization over gameplay, and the systematic dismissal of community feedback in favor of corporate metrics that bear no relationship to player experience.
Funcom didn’t acquire the Dune license to make a great game. They acquired it to extract revenue from an established fanbase, using the minimum viable product approach that has become standard practice in an industry where “launch now, fix later” has evolved into “launch now, abandon later.”
This documentation exists because these patterns repeat across companies, across franchises, across decades. The names change - the dysfunction remains constant. And sometimes, just sometimes, watching a company with Funcom’s track record convince people they’ve changed is peak comedy.
What You’ll Find Here
Part I: The Foundation of Failure - Who Funcom is, their previous games and and why their approach for Dune: Awakening was destined to fail before development even began. Spoiler: it’s the same story as always, just with more sand.
Part II: The Arrakis Disaster - License acquisition, first announcements and of course the inevitable launch day catastrophe! including the great Deep Desert backpedal where “visionary” Joel Bylos quoted Stephen King about having shit in your hand TROLOLOL
A Note on Tone
This documentation maintains analytical detachment not from cynicism, but from necessity. Emotional investment in corporate outcomes leads to wishful thinking, rationalization, and the kind of community Stockholm syndrome that enables companies like Funcom to repeat these patterns indefinitely.
The goal isn’t to mock failure - it’s to understand it. Though if corporate incompetence happens to be entertaining, well, that’s just a bonus. Corporate incompetence isn’t entertainment; it’s a systemic problem that affects real people who spend real money on products that don’t work as advertised.
That said, when a creative director publicly quotes Stephen King saying “shit in one hand, wish in the other, see which one fills up first” while explaining why their endgame design collapsed… chef’s kiss
The Archive
Every chapter includes primary source material: screenshots, archived forum posts, official statements, and community reactions. When Funcom inevitably tries to rewrite history - as they always do - this documentation will preserve what actually happened, when it happened, and how they responded.
Because in an industry built on hype, promises, and carefully managed narratives, someone has to maintain the actual record. And someone has to point out when the emperor has no clothes, even if the emperor is wearing a stillsuit.
This documentation began on August 14, 2025 and will continue until Funcom either achieves basic competence or abandons the project. Based on their historical patterns and current player statistics (22,300 current vs 189,333 peak), we’re prepared for a long project. LMAOOOOO