June 5, 2025

Proven Gamer

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Funcom announces Dune: Awakening will feature private servers at launch

Here’s how the game’s MMO style world will work with private servers

Dune: Awakening’s head start begins the day after tomorrow, on June 5th, with full launch arriving on June 10th. Today, Funcom is excited to announce that rentable private servers will be available beginning with the head start.

Private servers can be rented from several third-party providers, allowing players to have their own server where they decide who has access, and where certain gameplay settings can be adjusted including allowing free-for-all PvP.

Private servers have been one of the most requested features by the community, but it’s not at all obvious that this is now finally a reality.

After all, Dune: Awakening combines the survival and MMO genres, featuring large-scale multiplayer content, mechanics, and gameplay systems with several hundred players sharing the same, persistent world. It’s one of the things that make Dune: Awakening unique in the survival genre, with a broad set of features that are fundamentally MMO-like including shared spaces where players can engage in social activities, trade, and conflict.

So how do you make that work with a private server model?

Same as with official servers, each private server in Dune: Awakening also belongs to a World consisting of several other private servers rented by other players. While your private server can hold 40+ players concurrently, one World can have several hundred concurrent players. All servers in a World share the same social hubs and a massive, constantly changing Deep Desert where players will meet to both explore and engage in conflict over spice.

That means that what makes Dune: Awakening so unique as a survival game when playing on official servers, is retained also for private servers.

Because Dune: Awakening features this shared, large-scale multiplayer setup, naturally there are certain restrictions in just how much you can customize your private server.

For more information about private servers in Dune: Awakening, read our full announcement.

Dune: Awakening launches on PC in head start on June 5th and in full June 10th.