Dune Awakening’s take on monetisation actually sounds pretty decent, at least to those of us that remember paying cumbersome subscription fees

More Dune Awakening news has hit the internet, courtesy of a quick breakdown from Funcom on the game’s post launch plans. In addition, PC specs have been released in an official post on the game’s Steam store page.

The short video, narrated by chief creative officer Joel Byros, goes through the plan for the game’s life after it launches on May 20 later this year. In it, he announces on behalf of Funcom that Dune Awakening will not have a subscription like other MMOs. Instead, the game will be supported by optional paid DLC packs that’ll come out alongside free updates.

These free updates will contain quality of life updates, new features, new story content, and all the good stuff that keeps a live service game going. As for the optional DLCs, there’s no word on what they’ll contain, but we do know that you can either buy them standalone or as part of a season pass that’ll contain multiple things in one package.

Byros also revealed that, in some version of the game folks will be able to buy, players will be able to get a headstart over the poors (that’s a joke), which will allow them to jump into Dune Awakening early on the May 15. Bylos acknowledged that this would allow early access for players, but also states that this allows the team to “balance the server load” for the best possible experience when the game launches. Nothing hurts an MMO more than a shaky launch, after all.

Alongside this short video comes the aforementioned Steam post, which gave us the following info on minimum and recommended PC specs:

Minimum:

• OS:Windows 10 64-bit (or newer)
• Processor:Intel Core i5-7400, AMD Ryzen 3 1200
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB), AMD Radeon 5600XT (6GB)
• Storage:60 GB available space

Recommended:

• OS:Windows 10 64-bit (or newer)
• Processor:Intel Core i7-10700K, AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• Memory:16 GB RAM
• Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB), AMD Radeon 6700XT (12GB)
• Storage:75 GB available space

In addition, the post peels back the curtain on some cool PC features players will be able to mess around with, including NVIDIA’s DLSS 4, making Dune Awakening one of the first fully released games to use it, AMDs FSR, Intel’s XeSS 2, and Razer Chroma RGB and Razer Sensa HD Haptics. So if you’re planning on playing the game on PC, you’ve got some neato tools to make the game look and play better.

What do you think of this business model? I feel like I have so many subscriptions these days, and having a game that I can just buy and come back to every now and again suits me best. It’s why I keep jumping back into Guild Wars 2 every now and again. So yeah, no complaints from me. It also sounds like we’ll get some additional news soon, courtesy of a gameplay stream on March 24 mentioned at the tail end of the Steam blog post.

Let us know if you’ll be hanging around in the sand come May 20 (or maybe, five days earlier) below!