Studio Disables Family Sharing Feature for Dune: Awakening

Funcom announced it's implementing a rather big change for Dune: Awakening. For now, it seems that the Family Sharing feature is being disabled.

Dune: Awakening was released in June and one of the platforms was Steam. The platform has a Family Sharing feature, which is now called Steam Families. What it does is allow multiple users to share a single game library. It lets family members play each other's games. It also has a feature that lets parents manage game access and even playtime.

There's no question that this is indeed a good feature. That said, it's also prone to abuse, particularly cheating. For example, a lot of developers have it being used to circumvent bans. How this is done is that the banned individual creates a new account and then uses the feature to share it with the original account.

Fight Against Cheating

The studio's move for Dune: Awakening is not without basis. In a post, the studio revealed that as soon as they managed to learn about issues, especially those related to cheating, they immediately worked to fix them. In fact, it seems that a lot of hotfixes have been deployed addressing several exploits. They haven't stopped there as they also took direct action against those who used exploits. There has hundreds of players banned.

Disabling the Feature

According to the studio, disabling the Family Sharing was part of its efforts considering that they've seen this feature being "abused frequently." With that in mind, the studio says they apologize to those who are legitimately using this feature. They've already started the work addressing the issue.

The problem is that there's no exact date on when the work is going to be done though they're "aiming to implement those changes within this year."

Dune: Awakening takes players to an open world and multiplayer survival game on a massive scale. In reality, it’s more than just survival since the game offers a large-scale, persistent, and highly immersive world that has social hubs bustling with other players, server-wide politics and intrigue, and even a cinematic storyline that’s sure to leave players at the edge of their seat.

In this universe, the Fremen have vanished and Paul Atreides was never born. This is because Lady Jessica obeyed the Bene Gesserit and gave birth to a girl. Meanwhile, Duke Leto Atreides himself has survived the assault on Arrakeen and is now locked in a brutal conflict against the Harkonnen over Arrakis and its precious spice. This rather unique but still familiar take on the iconic sci-fi universe of Dune has players start as a prisoner sent to Arrakis and learn more about why the Fremen disappeared.

Dune: Awakening is available for the PC via Steam.