Dune Awakening disables Family Sharing as exploits see it "abused frequently"

Dune Awakening is doing a fairly decent job at cementing its place in the MMO scene so far - a scene that's notoriously hard to break into. However, as with all online multiplayer games, it's got an army of cheaters and bad actors to fight back against. In its efforts to make things fair for all players, developer Funcom has just revealed that it'll be disabling Family Sharing on Steam as it works to eliminate a rampant exploit. Even though it has already banned "hundreds of players" and wiped out lots of illegitimately earned Solaris, the studio says it has to remove the feature while it works out a way to permanently eliminate the exploit.

While its overall Steam rating still sits at a respectable, 'mostly positive' 75%, a closer look at user reviews in the last 30 days paints a slightly different story - just 63% of reviews are positive. Not a great look when you're trying to outdo so many of the best MMOs. A large reason for this drop is the continued frustration from legitimate players over cheaters and exploits that are ruining the fun. Dune Awakening has attempted to tackle many of these with hotfixes over recent weeks - such as this one to remove an item duplication exploit - and is of course banning players that it can prove have cheated. However, it's now taking more drastic action.

In a message to players outlining how it's trying to make Dune Awakening fairer, Funcom announces that it'll be disabling Steam Family Sharing - a universal feature on Valve's platform, but one that has opened the game up to some major exploits.

"We are temporarily disabling Family Sharing as part of our efforts as we have unfortunately seen this feature abused frequently," the message reads. "We apologize to our players who legitimately used this feature. We are actively working on changes that will allow us to re-enable the system as soon as possible. While we don't have an ETA to share at the moment, we are aiming to implement those changes within this year. We will let you know as soon as we have a date."

That very vague time frame means that it could be several months before Family Sharing is reenabled. In more positive news, Funcom does say that it is taking "direct action against players who used exploits, banning hundreds of players and removing large amounts of exploited Solaris from the game."

Speaking more generally, the studio also says that it's aware of "other issues caused by cheats and we have fixes in the works that we aim to implement in the next patches."

With Funcom going all-in on improving its cheating situation, we'll hopefully see reports from disgruntled players drop and that Steam rating begin to rise. For anyone that was using Family Sharing for Dune Awakening, we'll keep you posted as to when it'll be reactivated.

For more, check out our Dune Awakening base building guide, or if you're thinking about a fresh challenge, head to our best survival games list.

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