Dune: Awakening – Embedded Dev QA

For more than a year, 10 Pixel Bowl Studio QA Analysts and one Lead worked inside Funcom’s Bucharest office, supporting the development of Dune: Awakening and preparation for its PC launch on Steam. Embedded within the local production team, our colleagues worked with internal tools, supported performance and art runs, and monitored new builds before they reached the wider Functional QA team.

This was a project built around close collaboration. Our team joined a newly formed production team in Bucharest and became part of its working rhythm, learning Funcom’s procedures while helping developers understand the state of a game that was still taking shape.

The engagement at a glance

• Team: 10 QA Analysts and 1 Lead.
• Location: Embedded on-site at Funcom Bucharest.
• Duration: More than one year.
• Platform: PC, with preparation for the Steam launch.
• Scope: Embedded Development QA, internal tools, performance and art runs, and build monitoring ahead of broader FQA coverage.

Arrakis, a demanding world with a gaming legacy

Developed by Funcom, Dune: Awakening brought survival gameplay to Arrakis. Players must manage the desert’s hazards while gathering resources, crafting equipment, building bases and exploring a world shaped by sandworms and competing factions. Vehicles, including ornithopters, extend how players travel through and interact with that world. These interconnected systems give development teams a broad set of experiences to bring together. Explore the official game overview.

Dune also carries a significant gaming legacy. In his account of making Warcraft, producer and lead programmer Patrick Wyatt describes Dune II as a direct inspiration for Blizzard’s strategy game. Its influence reached beyond adapting a fictional universe: it helped shape how developers approached resource gathering, base construction and tactical combat. Read Wyatt’s account of that influence.

For us, that history adds context to the expectations surrounding a new Dune game. Players arrive with connections to the books, films and earlier games, alongside their own expectations of survival gameplay. Supporting development means paying attention to both individual features and how the wider experience comes together.

Working inside Funcom Bucharest

The engagement placed our team directly in Funcom’s office. Confidentiality requirements and close work with internal tools made on-site integration central to the arrangement. Funcom identifies Bucharest as its QA headquarters, making it a particularly relevant setting for an embedded QA partnership. Learn more about Funcom Bucharest.

Our colleagues had to adapt to Funcom’s procedures, terminology and way of working. Understanding the tools was one part of that adjustment; understanding how the production team communicated and used QA feedback was another. Working alongside the team gave that learning a practical context throughout the engagement.

For an embedded team, familiarity grows through daily involvement. Knowing the people, the project and the expectations around a build helps analysts interpret what they are seeing and communicate it clearly. More than a year in the studio gave our colleagues time to develop that understanding while continuously supporting development.

Development QA before the wider FQA handoff

Our role sat close to production, with new builds monitored before they were rolled out to the larger Functional QA team. That position made early visibility into build behaviour an important part of the engagement. The work connected internal development activity with the broader testing effort preparing the game for players.

• Internal tools: Working within Funcom’s tool environment and adapting to the processes used by its production team.
• Performance runs: Supporting the checking, management and monitoring of performance runs during development.
• Art runs: Supporting art-related runs and the checks associated with them as the game’s content developed.
• New-build monitoring: Reviewing incoming builds before their rollout to the larger FQA team, providing development-facing QA coverage at an earlier stage.

This kind of work requires context. A finding becomes more useful when the team understands the build it came from and the development activity around it. Our embedded position supported that close connection between testing and production, with attention focused on the work happening inside the studio.

The engagement continued through development and preparation for the PC Steam launch. Across that period, the team’s contribution remained grounded in the project’s internal workflows and the needs of the production team.

Adapting to the project and sustaining engagement

One of the central challenges was becoming effective within another studio’s established procedures. Our team needed to learn Funcom’s approach and work comfortably inside it. That adjustment involved everyday habits as much as tools: how work was coordinated, how feedback was communicated and how QA fitted into the production team’s routine.

A second challenge was maintaining motivation over a long engagement. More than a year on a single project brings valuable familiarity, but sustained attention and involvement still need care. For development QA, a changing game also means that knowledge must keep developing alongside the builds.

These challenges reinforced the human side of an embedded partnership. Analysts need to understand their contribution, feel connected to their colleagues and remain engaged with the game they are helping to test. The quality of the working relationship matters throughout that process.

A team that made us feel at home

Funcom’s people made a lasting difference to the experience. Our colleagues were welcomed into the Bucharest studio and treated as part of the team. They were included in events and activities, sharing the social side of studio life as well as the daily work.

That welcome helped the office feel like home. For a team spending more than a year embedded with a partner, a sense of belonging is meaningful. It supports the relationships and shared understanding that make close collaboration easier to sustain.

We are grateful to the Funcom team for creating that environment and making our colleagues feel included throughout the engagement.

A PC launch with a substantial audience

Dune: Awakening launched on PC on 10 June 2025. During its launch period, the game reached a Steam peak of 189,333 concurrent players, illustrating the scale of the audience arriving together at release.

The game sold one million copies in less than two weeks, becoming Funcom’s fastest-selling release, according to The Verge’s reporting on its launch performance. Funcom also celebrated the milestone in its official one-million-player announcement.

These launch milestones show the level of interest surrounding the game. Pixel Bowl Studio’s contribution was the embedded development support described here: an 11-person team working inside Funcom Bucharest for more than a year, supporting internal runs, monitoring builds and helping the production team prepare for the Steam release.

What this partnership demonstrates

Dune: Awakening shows how an embedded QA engagement can bring a partner team into the everyday life of production. The work depends on learning the studio’s tools and procedures, building project knowledge over time and maintaining a strong relationship with the people developing the game.

For Pixel Bowl Studio, the experience combined the challenge of supporting an ambitious game with the opportunity to work closely alongside a welcoming team. We are proud of the contribution our colleagues made and the collaboration they built with Funcom Bucharest.

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