From their 4th quarter of 2018 financial report:

"Exclusive gaming partnership established with Legendary Entertainment for the creation of a minimum of 3 games based on the DUNE Intellectual Property over the next six years, on PC and Console"

"Finally, we are very excited to announce an exclusive gaming partnership with Legendary Entertainment to develop a line of video games based on the works of Frank Herbert’s DUNE. DUNE is one of the world’s best-known science fiction universes and a personal favourite of mine. To work on DUNE games is a dream come true for many of us in Funcom. We will talk more about what we will do in this fantastic universe in the future."

It's not mentioned in the report as far as I can tell, but other sites are claiming the first project to be an open-world MMO similar to some of Funcom's other MMOs, for example based on the Conan franchise.

Ugh.

DUNE ONLINE, pre-order now to get a free blue-eyes cosmetic for your character, plus a free weirding module!

Blue eyes do look really unnatural.

MMOs are a dead genre. They are wasting their money IMO.

I thought Herbert, and after he passed his estate, had a huge bug up there ass about licensing. I'll never forget when Frank got super pissed just because Iron Maiden asked to name a song "Dune".

How did these folks get permission?

Considering their body of work, a MMO is almost guaranteed, but there's also hope for an adventure game and a possible turn based strategy game, OH MY!

As if squandering the license of one popular epic sci-fi franchise wasn't enough.

At the very least this could maybe open up new opportunities to once again try to convince the Herbert estate to greenlight re-releases of the classic Dune games.

Dune! Awesome!

Funcom ... well shit...

Why on Tellus would they seriously allow Funcom to use the Dune IP is beyond reason as Funcom has a track-record that is spotty to put it mildly. I know of several people who left Funcom because of their incompetent leaders/managers who would never learn from their past experience, and where creating a mess.

Does anyone even play Conan these days or has it just died off like most of the rest of the MMOs out there? Cheap and not a lot of content.

I want to be positive but absolutely no good can come from this if they decide to go all in for an MMO. They might do good if they make an classic RTS game, although, riding a sandworm in first person could be fun :)


EDIT: post a link to the news next time ;)

https://investors.funcom.com/funcom-n-v-enters-into-exclusive-partnership-with-legendary-studios-for-games-in-the-dune-universe/

But Age of Conan has great immersion and lore and music!!!

Could be worse, like EA who couldn't make anything worthy (or just anything) with Star Wars.

Now maybe there can be a chance to bring Dune games on GOG, would play Emperor BoD again.

MMOs? These days? Secret World was awesome unlike all these WoW parroting clones but still - these day?

You know, Conan Exiles would be a great game if there would be something else to do in it besides the standard survival and sandbox building. It looks pretty nice and I like the setting and the setup of it, but it doesn't take too long for it to turn boring.

That reminds me how much fun I had with the Age of Conan and its tutorial environment before the game pushed you to the open world. It had the atmosphere, the story was interesting and the gameplay was fun. Then it all went down the drain in the open world, where I could barely walk out from the first city because happy campers were executing everyone who was green behind the ears. They, I assume the same people, killed me three times, then I just decided to call it quits and uninstall it.

nevermind

> Exclusive

Ehh… I'd rather have copyright reformed. This madness must stop.

Yeah. The Longest Journey, Anarchy Online, The Secret World, Conan... such mediocre games.