You know, I’m starting to think that either interviewers love baiting Funcom about Dune Awakening’s MMORPG status, or Funcom really loves baiting MMORPG players about it, but one way or another, it is 2026, and we’re still apparently doing the thing where Joel Bylos comes out with a new take on MMORPGs to try to exclude Dune Awakening but doesn’t actually do it and makes headlines all over again. (I’m fond of Bylos, so just imagine I am doing this whole post with an affectionate but tired mom tone.)

Yes, this week, Bylos is back rewriting history and reframing the genre again, suggesting that Funcom originally settled on the term “MMO” for Dune Awakening “because [the devs] figured it was easy,” which is interesting to us because Bylos appeared to have no qualms at all when describing the game as a sandbox MMORPG in 2024 and indeed explaining how Dune’s gameloop was heavily inspired by MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies, a player-economy-driven crafter-centric sandbox MMORPG that is still unbeaten in that arena as far as I’m concerned.

Of course, a year ago, just as Dune was gearing up for launch, Bylos was hedging on those comments, trying to pivot the game’s marketing back to the hardcore survival genre to attract, we assume, the kinds of people who play Tarkov, not WoW. MMORPG players weren’t fooled, and neither were Tarkov players, as the game’s PvP split and subsequent revisions that favor the 80% of players who came for PvE content have already shown.

But even after all of that, according to an interview on FRVR, Bylos has swung even harder against calling this MMO an MMO.

“I don’t think it’s an MMO,” he argues. “I’ve worked on multiple MMOs for sure, but I think there was a weird space where we were trying to do slightly more. We have this big, connected world, we have this big deep desert with lots of players being able to go in there. So it was a hard game to describe, and I always find that people kind of have a very set notion of what a genre is. So it’s hard to describe something that does something slightly new. […] It’s not an MMO is my strong feeling right now. […] it’s definitely not.”

But then he goes on to claim that the key reason is progression – that MMORPGs like World of Warcraft focus on quest-based progression, while Dune’s progression revolves around crafting. If you’re about to object and point out that kind of a lot of MMORPG progression has traditionally focused on crafting and non-quest-oriented content, I know. I was there too. I know. And it’s why this argument isn’t compelling, why it keeps failing to persuade people who actually live and breathe MMORPGs, as opposed to gamers from other genres who have been misled into thinking MMOs are just games exactly like WoW.

This is well-trod ground for MMORPG players, unfortunately, and I don’t just mean the fool’s errand of trying to define the MMORPG genre by attributes for which there is always an exception that disproves the rule. Last summer, I deep-dived a group of MMORPGs and their studios – Dune Awakening, New World, The Cube, Lionhearts – that have been working overtime to redefine the MMORPG into a very small box that bizarrely excludes most historical MMORPGs. In fact, I explicitly showed how the rise of the survival genre has “effectively robbed the MMORPG genre one of the fundamental terms we use to identify styles of MMOs” – that is, the long-running sandbox MMORPGs that focus on crafting, building, lifeskills, PvP, housing, and skilling and often lack quests entirely, all the way back to Ultima Online. To quote that piece:

“These studios don’t dislike MMORPGs; they just don’t want the responsibility or cost of running a whole one, so they’re slowly redefining what MMOs are, either to get out of supporting them or to pick out subgenres to monetize separately, from MOBAs to battle royales and now to basic sandbox content, exploration, and the living world. Or maybe they’re just doing what Funcom did: waffle so hard on whether Dune Awakening is an MMO that it managed to convince not just gamers but itself that it didn’t have to listen to decades of MMO lessons. MMO gankbox endgames don’t work, but we’re not an MMO, so our gankbox endgame will work! […] Maybe all of this would be mere semantics except that those semantics shape history, and right now, we’re allowing semantics to both erase our genre and shrink its horizon too. To paraphrase myself: The reason ‘nobody is making MMORPGs/MMOs anymore’ is that gamers and studios have started believing and regurgitating that only 1:1 WoW clones are MMORPGs and nothing else counts. We are defining MMOs out of existence because we refuse to let them evolve – and refuse to acknowledge their bygone diversity.”

Unfortunately, this interview suggests to me that the depressing trend we identified continues – even with old-school MMORPG devs who know better.

Further reading: