Joel Bylos, design director at Funcom, told an interviewer in November that "It’s not an MMO is my strong feeling right now" when asked how to classify Dune: Awakening.
The remark follows a decision by Funcom to remove the MMO label from the game before it launched in June, a step the studio took after years of development and public expectation. Bylos said that decision — and the difficulty of pinning down the title’s identity — was a major headache. "I mean, I think that’s one of the biggest challenges we had during development. How to describe it," he said, and added plainly elsewhere that "it’s definitely not."
Bylos used concrete details to explain the grey area. He said the game runs on an online server setup and includes multiple maps, and that it offers "a big connected world and a deep desert with lots of players." He compared the project to established MMOs for mechanics: both Dune: Awakening and World of Warcraft use level-based progression, but where World of Warcraft "focuses on quests" he said, Dune: Awakening "focuses on crafting." Even so, Bylos acknowledged the overlap: the game "still has MMO elements."
Those mixed signals, Bylos said, were partly self-inflicted. He told the interviewer Funcom first described the project as an MMO "because it was easy," and later removing that label "I don’t think that helped either," creating confusion among players and press ahead of the June launch.
Funcom’s background and Bylos’s résumé deepen the context. The studio is largely known as an MMO company, and Bylos has worked on multiple MMOs including Age of Conan and The Secret World. Dune: Awakening has been described elsewhere as a massively multiplayer online RPG and a survival game, and the title recently split PvE and PvP players into segregated groups. The studio has framed the project as a long-term proposition, with a reported 10-year plan and work under way on a console port.
The tension is straightforward: the game’s architecture and player scale resemble MMOs, but Funcom and its design lead are actively resisting the label. Bylos’s remarks expose a marketing and design dilemma — calling something an MMO invites a set of player expectations around scale, systems and social structure that Dune: Awakening’s emphasis on crafting and its particular server and map setup do not cleanly match.
Bylos’s answer is the answer: Dune: Awakening, in his view, is not an MMO, even though it borrows enough infrastructure and features from the genre to feel familiar to MMO players. That distinction matters now because Funcom has already shifted how it presents the game, and because the studio plans to sustain and expand the world over years; how it labels and builds the title will shape who shows up, how they play, and how the community grows over the next decade.
