The fun thing about making a game based on a big movie property is that you get to hobnob with Hollywood royalty. The bad news is that it’s through Jira.
Joel Bylos, chief creative officer at Funcom, explains that while making Dune Awakening, the studio had to run various things by Legendary, the company behind the Dune movies. “We submit things to Jira, they approve within a certain amount of time,” he explains, namedropping the widely used project-management software that’s either an absolute godsend or a relentless destroyer of joy, depending on your personal point of view. “If they don’t approve within a certain amount of time, we escalate to them: ‘Hey, we need you to approve this’. Usually it’s a pretty automated process. It runs pretty solidly.”
This may all sound disappointingly bland, but that very blandness is the sign of a successful working relationship. Bylos says Funcom has built trust with the film studio, reassuring them that their precious IP was in safe hands. “When you’ve established that trust, the processes aren’t necessarily as important: it’s more about just knowing that the other people have the IP’s back.” Hence the approval process can be reduced to the flick of a Jira ticket, rather than, say, angry phone calls from film executives.
Legendary decides whether to escalate any requests up the chain, such as to author Frank Herbert’s estate or to movie director Denis Villeneuve. Bylos says one piece of feedback from Villeneuve was that the game’s title “could be a little too close to Star Wars” – i.e., The Force Awakens – but needless to say, Dune Awakening won through in the end.
All this is a far cry from the lax oversight of licensed games in the last century, when the video game tie-in was often little more than an afterthought. Game and film companies are working more closely together than ever before – and what’s really interesting is the idea that game companies could look more like film companies in the future.
As Code Wizards head Stuart Muckley outlined to GamesIndustry.biz as part of ExDev Week, the increase in project financing that we’re seeing in the games industry (as opposed to firms taking equity stakes in games companies) means that “it’s very likely game projects will start to follow a model similar to the movie business, where a legal entity is created for each game.” In other words, each game becomes a company.
Bylos can see the sense in it: “You spread the financial risk into a holding company, which is how Hollywood works, right? There’s financing per project instead of a company putting everything on the line. So they’re like, ‘Oh, here’s the Dune project, if you want to invest in the Dune project, that’s what you do’. But then the investor isn’t investing in, say, Funcom necessarily.”
It’s important to note the above is a hypothetical scenario – for now at least. And Bylos emphasises that there might have to be changes in the games industry if it was to move towards a movie-style model where people are employed on specific games, probably on fixed-term contracts. “I think the Hollywood model works because they have very strong unions,” he says. “It’s easy for people to be exploited if you don’t have strong unions.”
Car wash upgrade
Bylos has been with Funcom for a long time: nearly 20 years, in fact. He married a Norwegian and moved to Norway from Australia in the early 2000s. “I found it was quite difficult to get English work – I had to learn Norwegian,” he says. “I washed cars at a car rental place for the first three years that I lived there.”
“When I was washing cars, I wondered, ‘Am I always going to be doing this? Because I have a university degree from Australia’.”
His lucky break came in 2007, when he secured a job as a quest designer on Funcom’s Age of Conan. He would later become creative director on Conan Exiles, and took on the newly created role of chief creative officer for Funcom in 2019. Right now, his preoccupation is with the launch of PC hit Dune Awakening on consoles, which coincides with a huge update to the multiplayer survival game.
“I think probably the biggest change is the fact that we added a single player mode,” he says. In addition, in response to player feedback, Funcom has added various options to adjust the game’s difficulty. “It’s essentially creative mode from Minecraft,” he says. “People want to have the ability to customise their games more and more, I think. It’s just becoming kind of standard.”
All of this naturally involved a huge amount of work. “Multiplayer balance is completely different to single player balance,” Bylos notes. “And then obviously you optimise the hell out of a game for a console. The consoles have different requirements, but there’s something nice about having a reliable piece of hardware that doesn’t change.”
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The console ports also gave Funcom the chance to play around with the haptics and adaptive triggers in the PlayStation DualSense controller. “It’s very nice to work with. We have opportunities in Dune that I think fit very well, like the sandworm and the vibrations when you’re walking on the sand.”
Bylos is hoping that the console launch will bring in a “whole surge” of players, and Funcom has been thinking about how best to keep them playing. “We’ve been looking at how we push our retention more, things like having more events in the game, keeping people in longer,” he says.
Funcom might also try different monetisation models in future. Currently, Dune Awakening is a premium title with various paid DLCs, but Bylos notes that Funcom has experimented with different models in the past, like in Conan Exiles.
“Eventually we moved to a battle pass store model, and then we dropped the battle pass because that wasn’t really the thing, but we kept the store. I assume Dune will follow a similar thing. We will see the trends, and we’ll see what’s happening, and then we’ll see what makes sense for us.
“I think you have to with live service games, right? I think you just don’t know what’s going to happen. Even in my career, it was MMOs with subscriptions, and then all the MMOs dropped subscriptions and became pay once – Guild Wars 2 really pioneered a lot of that – and then it’s been free to play with monetisation. It’s now kind of a mess and they’re all different.
“I’ve recently seen a lot of articles talking about in-game advertising… it’s funny because people don’t know that we pioneered that in Anarchy Online”
“The business models have upgraded and changed so much, and you never know what the next one’s going to be. I’ve recently seen a lot of articles talking about in-game advertising making a big comeback. We wouldn’t do that in Dune, but it’s funny because people don’t know that we pioneered that in Anarchy Online, our old game from 2001. And it made sense: it was a sci-fi, futuristic city, and we had banners in the game that were paid advertising from companies outside the game.
“We got decent money for that, and it didn’t really impact player experience. And it’s just funny to see that that’s making a comeback now, that business model.”
All hands on deck
Funcom announced a wave of layoffs in late 2025 in order to focus on releasing new content for Dune Awakening. Shortly afterwards, it was revealed that the Funcom-owned studio The Outsiders – maker of Metal: Hellsinger – would be closing.
So, is the studio only working on Dune Awakening now?
“No, we have people working on Conan Exiles still,” says Bylos. “The enhanced edition came out earlier in the year, and there’s a very few people like me [whose] job is to think about the future, so I’m also looking at what’s next after Dune.
“But yeah, the majority of people are on Dune Awakening, and that’s kind of the way it will stay, I’d say, for quite a while. We’re not ready to start a new game, so it’s really just wispy thoughts in the back of our heads about what could be next.
“It’s funny, with game development, I feel like there’s always this game of [predicting the] technological future. You’re trying to read where the technology’s going to be in five years, and right now with AI, I don’t think you can see where the technology’s going to be in five months. It makes that game very difficult to play.”
He thinks that’s partly why investment is so hard to come by in the current environment. “I think everybody’s holding their breath, waiting to see what comes from it.”
“My feeling is that games are going to have to optimise better and remain working on core platforms”
What about mobile? TiMi Studio Group – which, like Funcom, is owned by Tencent – is on the cusp of releasing Monster Hunter Outlanders, a mobile version of Capcom’s franchise that features almost all the functionality of its console counterparts, thanks to improvements in mobile technology. So would Funcom consider porting Dune Awakening to mobile devices?
“I don’t think our expertise is there,” says Bylos. “I think Tencent has better studios than Funcom to develop mobile games. It’s just not what we’re good at… Our expertise is in other areas.”
But Bylos does see a trend towards gaming on the go, as well as the need for games to run on relatively low-powered machines. “I think we’re going to see more and more of these Steam Deck-like devices,” he says. “My feeling is that games are going to have to optimise better and remain working on core platforms. The consoles are going to get older, and they’re probably not going to release new ones until the memory crisis is resolved, because otherwise their margins won’t make sense. So I think more and more games are going to become more stylised and less memory heavy.”
He notes that the race to photorealism is still a big preoccupation in the industry, but this runs counter to the reality of a generation of children who grew up playing Roblox. “They don’t give a damn about graphics, not one bit. I see it with my kids. They don’t care, they want the gameplay. So I think it’s going to be more true than ever that gameplay is king, and you optimise towards whatever the low powered platforms are. I think Steam Deck is a perfect example.”
Games like Meccha Chameleon that “can run on anything” are what the audience wants. “So where does that leave a high-fidelity developer like us? It’s a good question. I think it’s more of a question about stylisation for the future.”
He points to World of Warcraft as an example of a game with stylised graphics that have stood the test of time. “It’s been around for a long time now, and it still looks really good. Obviously they’ve upgraded a few things, but it’s a sort of timeless art direction.”
Funcom’s next game might still be at the wispy-thought stage, but given the prevailing winds of the game industry, it seems like a good bet that it will lean more into style than photorealism – and rather than being geared towards the high-spec devices of the future, it could well set the technological bar much lower. After all, as we enter the age of $1,000+ consoles, the majority of the audience is likely to be playing on older machines for many years to come.