Dune: Awakening

VS

Scum

As of late August 2025, Dune: Awakening had approximately 14,000 concurrent players, reflecting a significant decline from its peak of over 189,000 concurrent players shortly after launch in June 2025. This decrease is attributed to factors such as player burnout, game design issues, and technical problems. Despite these challenges, the developers remain optimistic, citing strong player retention and a 10-year development roadmap that includes plans to explore new planets and regions within the Dune universe. ([gamesradar.com](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/mmo/dune-awakening-dev-says-player-retention-has-been-extremely-good-and-the-mmos-10-year-plan-still-has-so-much-to-pull-from-in-the-lore-well-go-to-new-planets-eventually/?utm_source=openai))

Scum is a multiplayer open-world survival game developed by Gamepires and originally entered Early Access in 2018. While it is not a full MMO, it supports servers with dozens of players (up to 64 per server). The game maintains a niche but dedicated following and is frequently updated; however, it has never reached large mainstream status. Based on long-term trends of similar survival games, its daily active player base is estimated to be in the low thousands, and this estimate would hold unless a major relaunch or expansion revitalized the player base.