Dune: Awakening continues the transmedia trend of movies branching out into games and vice versa. This strategy is a surefire way to initially get eyeballs on your game from the IP’s existing fanbase, but it also comes with the stigma of a studio cashing in on a beloved franchise. Thankfully, Norwegian publisher/developer Funcom has proven that they are treating the Dune universe with respect, carefully tinkering with the series’ lore to justify this new game.
That game, Dune: Awakening, is a Survival MMO that drops players into an alternate-timeline Arrakis where bandits scour the shifting sands for precious water. We’ve previously covered MMOs and mobile MMOs in our other articles, but it’s been a while since a much-hyped Survival game has been released. Let’s take this opportunity to see how Dune: Awakening’s Survival game aspects were received by viewers and how Survival games in general perform on live streaming.
Dune: Awakening Captures Live Streaming Attention on Twitch
As expected for an IP-backed title, the game had a strong performance upon release. In its debut week, Dune: Awakening brought in just shy of 10M hours watched with a peak viewership of 175K. For comparison, that’s about ⅓ of the viewership that Elden Ring: Nightreign received last week: A decent effort considering that game belongs to one of the most successful franchises on live streaming. As a Survival MMO, the bulk of this viewership came from Twitch – not so surprising. However, we have also excluded a massive 3.4M hours watched from this total that came from Steam, due to our previous analysis that the Steam Store page inflates viewership.
While it’s easy to attribute this success to the Dune IP alone, it’s worth mentioning the overwhelming praise that the game design itself has received from the online community. Survival game fans agree that Dune: Awakening has some of the first true AAA-quality survival gameplay, elevating traditionally simplistic combat and creating gorgeous settings on par with RPGs. This improved combat has been crucial to the game’s live-streaming success: Better combat justified more frequent combat, which means more spectacle for viewers (instead of tedious, passive resource collection). Aspects of the genre borrowed from other titles were also improved upon or implemented competently, such as base building from Rust and Subnautica.
The Top 3 streamers for Dune: Awakening by hours watched during the game’s debut week were the usual suspects for new game releases: Shroud (1.1M), PirateSoftware (708K), and CohhCarnage (493K). However, the rest of the Top 10 were made up by a healthy spread of streamers on other platforms with between 100 – 200K hours watched each. The smaller streamer spread of the game is actually good news: Though there’s less hype, this kind of spread is more sustainable and suggests there’s a community of hardcore streamers supporting the game. That’s important for any new release, but especially for an MMO or live service game.
As mentioned earlier, we removed Steam viewership from the overall totals… However, there are quite a few legitimate Steam streamers that covered Dune: Awakening upon release. These include GuardianAngelz and sema_ with 128K and 110K hours watched, respectively. Alongside their dev/ad stream, it seems that Funcom has been promoting these Steam native streamers as an additional influencer marketing strategy.
Dune: Awakening Wins Over MMO Skeptics Upon Release
Coming from a movie IP is always a double-edged sword for new game releases: You have a built-in fanbase, but those fans can turn on you if they suspect you’re cashing in on their beloved franchise. We decided to take a closer look at how fans reacted to Dune: Awakening’s initial announcement and compare this to the game’s reception upon release to see how Funcom shifted public opinion around the game.
Dune: Awakening was originally announced at Gamescom 2022 with a short teaser trailer. The initial response was largely welcoming, with 23.1% positive sentiment vs. 11.3% negative sentiment out of the 4.9K messages sent. The negative camp was largely composed of MMO skeptics, with understandable exhaustion at that time from known cinematic IPs attempting to make the leap into MMOs. Funcom anticipated this response however, and had already made plans to begin its influencer marketing campaign a mere hour after the teaser trailer released. The campaign largely centered on the game’s CGI trailer, using it to sell the legitimacy of the world of Arrakis in Survival MMO form and link it aesthetically with Denis Villeneuve’s films.
By the time the game was released, the polished marketing campaign had shifted. Funcom now hosted behind-the-scenes developer streams centred on specific details like the lore of Dune: Awakening and emphasizing how the game’s new timeline remained in the spirit of Frank Herbert’s original books. These strategies built faith in the game as being a serious project, not merely a cash-in. The results speak for themselves: In Dune: Awakening’s debut week, positive sentiment rose to 31% vs. just 12.4% negative sentiment, with many positive comments reflecting an acceptance of the game’s genre. Streamers convinced viewers to give the genre a shot: “Not really into MMO but have been watching you… Looks like a blast.” A Twitch Drops campaign was part of the reason viewers flocked to streamers in the first place, providing the spark that enabled this reaction.
Survival Games Create Compelling Clips for Social Media
Historically, Survival games have done very well on live streaming, being one of the more popular genres alongside Extraction Shooters and Battle Royales. Like those genres, Survival games rely on tense fights to create engaging viewing. But unlike those genres, this resource management and situational awareness persists even outside of combat. This means that, at any moment, a surprise encounter might lead to a highlight of the entire stream. These highlights create clippable moments for social media platforms like TikTok, increasing the reach of the streamer. In short then, Survival games are one of the best genres for generating this flow from tension, to highlight, to social amplification.
It’s no surprise then that the Top 3 Survival games on live streaming have historically pulled in massive monthly hours watched, including Rust (202M), Minecraft (141M), and Escape from Tarkov (121M). The sheer gameplay diversity from full PvP to full PvE among these top titles shows how versatile Survival games can be, and explains why they’ve been able to endure for so long without oversaturating the market. There’s also the ability for indie games to break out in this space, including Valheim (37M) and Sons of the Forest (25M). If Dune: Awakening follows the trend of most successful game launches, then it will most likely settle between V Rising and Terraria with its first 30 days viewership.
_
Considering the MMO aspects of Dune: Awakening, the game will likely expand further out and may hit higher monthly viewerships than its debut (as opposed to, say, games with single-player campaigns like RPGs).
On the Survival side, we may see a similar effect to Rust where the game experiences surges in viewership whenever the servers reset. The best path for future growth on live-streaming platforms Dune: Awakening would be to partner with key streamers that can form RP servers in game, as these have led to historically high viewership for games like Rust and GTA V. With Survival games still going strong in 2025, there’s massive potential for Dune: Awakening to become the standard in polished, engaging survival gameplay moving forward..
To keep up to date with the latest big game launches on live streaming, follow Stream Hatchet:
