How Lurkit powered Dune: Awakening's success with content creators
RESULTS
9,1M hours watched on Twitch
One-third of all Twitch viewership came from Lurkit creators
26M Views on Shorts + TikTok
Another 8,4M long-form video views on YouTube
1M+ copies sold in 2 weeks
Funcom's biggest and fastest-selling game ever
Company overview
Funcom’s journey kicked off in 1993, when they collaborated on games for classic consoles like the SNES, SEGA Genesis and PlayStation 1. By 2001, they were blazing their own trail with the launch of Anarchy Online, the first true sci-fi MMO. Fast-forward two decades, and Funcom has carved out a legacy in the MMO world with hits like Age of Conan, Conan Exiles, and now, Dune: Awakening, their most ambitious project yet.
Game overview
Dune: Awakening blends open-world survival with large-scale multiplayer gameplay in one of sci-fi’s most iconic universes. Building on Funcom’s deep experience with online worlds and tapping into the global excitement around Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster movies, Awakening is shaping up to be one of 2025’s biggest hits.
If you’ve ever tried to describe Dune: Awakening, you’ll know it’s not easy. It’s a survival game, but it has massively multiplayer elements. It’s a sandbox, but there’s a story. That complexity is what makes it brilliant, but also tricky to market.
It’s an open-world sandbox hybrid that escapes pure definition. With survival mechanics at its core and Dune lore at its heart, it’s grindy and complex. It features an exciting main story but also blends in MMO aspects and large-scale PvP. Effectively, it appeals to various players who experience it in different ways. That made it harder to market. We needed creators who could show what makes it special.” Tomek Zabczyński, Influencer Manager @Funcom
To successfully reach a large, relevant audience, Funcom needed creators who would stick with the game. People who’d get past the early hours and help their audience do the same. That’s where Lurkit came in.
We worked closely with Zabczyński and his team. In the run-up to launch, we supported the sandy sci-fi survive ‘em up across multiple marketing beats:
February 2025
Character creator demo at Next Fest
April 2025
Content creator + Press-only beta
May 2025
Large-scale beta open to all players
June 2025
Early Access + Full launch
We provided the platform and helped Zabczyński with campaign strategy along the way. The Lurkit Team:
Handpicked thousands of content creators who have the right audience for Dune: Awakening
Used the Funcom Creator Program with extreme efficiency to maintain viewership across YouTube, TikTok and Twitch post-launch
Ran a large-scale key campaign targeting creators worldwide
Managed an array of sponsorship agreements targeting the most important markets for Funcom’s success
But how do you market a game that doesn’t fit neatly into any genre box? Strap into your ornithopter, you’re about to find out.
The Solution:
This project was full on. We leveraged every tool in Lurkit's arsenal with Funcom placing their full trust in us as a true partner throughout the entire journey, an extension of their own team. Lurkit became an indispensable part of the operation. Our Campaign Team especially made strong use of the existing Funcom Creator Program, activating a mass of creators across multiple beats. Many were longtime Funcom supporters with audiences that aligned perfectly with Dune: Awakening, while others were new faces who joined the journey along the way.
When it came to choosing creators to take part in April’s beta, the focus was mainly on those with a background in survival games, for an important reason.
We wanted creators who could navigate the early game grind while keeping their audiences engaged. We didn’t want people who would bounce off the tutorial section without getting into the game proper."
As each marketing beat passed, Funcom were able to refine their player profiles. This, in turn, helped our team come up with fresh faces for the latter stages.
We had hundreds of thousands of players participate in the beta in some form. That gave us a lot of good feedback, and this allowed us to develop a player profile. We went beyond just your survival player or MMO player. Our research led us to players who were interested in community-building experiences and those who were keen to show off their skills.”
The launch period saw the scope widened to include creators who were fans of action games. One sub-genre in particular stood out.
We found that creators who play extraction shooters really like the game. They enjoy the feel of the shooting. We managed to get people who normally only engage with these kinds of shooter games, like JackFrags. And you won’t find a better shooter ambassador than Shroud. The fact that he loves Awakening tells you a lot.”
Organic viewership and proper creator verification for the win!
Backing the paid sponsorships was our Key Campaign, which distributed game keys to over 6,000 verified creators. At Lurkit, our philosophy is clear: paid campaigns are designed to spark momentum, but it’s the organic creator interest that signals true success. With Dune: Awakening, we activated the right paid creators to generate buzz and amplify key beats, while our Creator Program and Key Campaign sustained consistent viewership from pre-launch through launch and beyond.
The Creator Program, in particular, played a key role thanks to the Funcom team’s experience with the feature on their previous games. Zabczyński:
We invested early in Lurkit’s Creator Program. We experimented with the platform around our existing games to build up our knowledge and develop relationships with Lurkit’s creators and staff over the two years preceding the launch of Awakening.”
Naturally, a high-profile title like Dune: Awakening also attracts an overwhelming wave of fake interest. That’s why our Creator Verification Team manually vetted every single creator, both for paid and organic opportunities, to keep bad actors out. The gates stayed shut.
We experienced a lot of phishing and scam attempts due to the popularity of Awakening, but distributing keys via Lurkit allowed us to verify requests en masse and stop thousands of fake requests. The fact that we didn’t see massive amounts of keys being resold proves how well your systems work.”
The team also reviewed thousands of content submissions to ensure every piece—regardless of creator size—was authentic, aligned with Dune and Funcom’s brand guidelines, and met the specific requirements of each campaign.
The Results
Following its full PC release on June 10, Dune: Awakening surged to a peak of 142,000 concurrent players. It broke its record five days later, reaching 189,000 players and landing firmly in Steam’s top 5 most-played games.
In total, 1,000,000 players took a trip to Arrakis in the two weeks following release. This makes Awakening Funcom’s fastest-selling game in the studio’s 30+ year history. Super impressive stuff. Now let’s show you how each marketing milestone led to this record-breaking launch.
Steam Next Fest
7th
most popular demo
21k
hours watched on Twitch
150k
long-form video views
60k
YouTube Shorts + TiKTok views
Funcom’s Next Fest demo provided access to Awakening’s expansive character creator and benchmark mode. This gave players a head start on building their characters and allowed them to test their rigs against the game's technical demands.
This interest was generated in large part by creator content. Twitch saw over 40,000 hours of airtime, more than half of which (21,000 hours) came from creators activated by Lurkit.
On YouTube, our creators generated 150,000 views, while short-form clips across TikTok and YouTube Shorts contributed an additional 60,000 views to the campaign’s total reach.
Top Creator Performances
Top Creator Performances
Duncstar
Average CCV: 459
Hours Watched: 552
Airtime: 1.2 hours
MissBrittGaming
Average CCV: 52
Hours Watched: 93
Airtime: 1.8 hours
MaleOreo
Platform: YouTube
Avg Viewers: 34k
Likes: 768
Press & creator beta + Large-scale beta
3,2k
content produced
2,8M
hours watched on Twitch
4,1M
long-form video views
1,2M
Shorts + TikTok views
Following Next Fest, Funcom opened the doors to two major beta phases: a press and creator-only beta in April, followed by a large-scale beta in May, which was open to the public.
During the creator-only beta, our Paid Campaign and Quest activations drove significant traction across both Twitch and YouTube. On Twitch, our creators amassed over 517,000 hours watched, while YouTube content generated over 1.95 million views.
Next came the large-scale public beta, which built on the earlier test and scaled it through organic creator participation. Without additional campaign spending, the game reached a broad audience, with over 2.3 million hours watched on Twitch and a further 2.2 million organic views on YouTube.
Top Creator Performances
Top Creator Performances
LIRIK
Platform: Twitch
Average CCV: 17,4k
Hours Watched: 134k
CohhCarnage
Platform: Twitch
Average CCV: 9,6k
Hours Watched: 123k
VanossGaming
Platform: YouTube
Video Views: 591k
Likes: 23k
Launch
11,4k
content produced
6,3M
hours watched on Twitch
4,1M
long-form video views
26M
views on Shorts + TikTok
With two successful beta phases complete, attention turned to Dune: Awakening’s launch. Early access was available from June 5, leading to the full release on June 10.
During this period, Lurkit-powered content drove massive engagement on Twitch, with a total of 6.29 million hours watched. Of this, 2.1 million hours came from high-profile creators outside of our platform who were activated through our paid campaign.
Another 125,595 hours were delivered via Paid Quests by creators within the Lurkit ecosystem. Notably, over 4 million hours watched came from creators on Lurkit who joined the campaign organically. This kind of reach underscores the game’s strong appeal and our platform’s ability to mobilize creators at scale.
We successfully drove significant reach across both short-form and long-form video platforms. On YouTube Shorts and TikTok, content generated a combined 26 million views. Approximately 18 million of these views originated from organic creator participation, while the remaining 8 million were generated through paid activations.
Long-form content on YouTube also performed strongly, adding a total of 4 million views. Of these, around 3.1 million were organic, highlighting how creators across tiers contributed to sustaining interest in the survival game during the launch period.
Top Creator Performances
Top Creator Performances
Shroud
Platform: Twitch
Average CCV: 10,2k
Hours Watched: 2,5M
PirateSoftware
Platform: Twitch
Average CCV: 7,4k
Hours Watched: 2,3M
zanny
Platform: YouTube
Video Views: 3,3M
Likes: 128k
The perfect sandstorm of success
Often, the success or failure of a creator campaign hinges on the quality of the game. In this case, it’s clear that Dune: Awakening has quality in spades. That, in turn, led to creators staying engaged.
During each phase of this campaign, almost all contracted creators streamed for longer than required, with many going live for 15 hours or more. High-profile YouTubers released long-form videos singing the game’s praises. And we saw a ton of support from creators on the short-form side through TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
Together, Funcom and Lurkit made sure that these key creators, who went above and beyond, were supported. Zabczyński:
We expected streamers playing far longer than they were paid for, and as we knew our game sticks very well from internal data analyses. We had direct lines with the key creators. If someone lost their ornithopter, we restored it. If someone had a bug to report, we addressed it. We were there 24/7.”
It’s this kind of commitment and community support that has turned Awakening into a record-breaking title for Funcom. On that note, how does Zabczyński sum up Lurkit’s contribution to its success?
We wouldn’t have been able to coordinate all these big creators and reach + activate so many small creators without Lurkit. Activating both organic and paid creators at this kind of scale is impossible outside of the Lurkit Platform."
Of course, once a game like Dune: Awakening starts making waves, the challenges you face also evolve. Gaining momentum and hype around the title turns into retaining interest and getting creators and players alike to retain, play more and more. For that, we had multiple contingency plans to be able to reactive and move fast depending on new needs and goals from Funcom. In that regard, Tomek added:
Collaborating with Lurkit is always smooth. You are the experts. We understand each other, and we can make fast moves together with your recommendations. I know you don't need my control over your every movement, and I think this kind of trust doesn't come easily. Everyone at Funcom is happy.”
Lurkit and Funcom will continue to work together for the upcoming Dune: Awakening events and campaigns, and we will continue to act as the bridge between Funcom and content creators.
