Dune: Awakening has pulled the plug on Steam Family Sharing after a surge in cheating and exploit abuse. Funcom confirmed the move was necessary to protect the game’s integrity, and that the feature may not return until late 2025 if at all.

Steam Family Sharing was a cheat loophole for alt accounts

Steam Family Sharing, a tool intended to let households share game libraries, had been twisted into a cheat bypass system. Players would exploit the feature to create alternate accounts that avoided bans while still accessing Dune: Awakening.

Funcom called it out plainly in a recent statement: the system was being “abused frequently,” especially in ways that made it harder to track and punish cheaters. Some users ran bots or hacks on shared profiles, while their main account stayed untouched.

Dune: Awakening’s anti-cheat tools couldn’t keep up

The game’s current anti-cheat system wasn’t built to handle multi-account shenanigans with linked libraries. Exploiters could run the same scripts again and again under fresh accounts, while Funcom struggled to trace them back to a single source.

By cutting off Steam Family Sharing access, the studio has forced cheaters back onto primary accounts where enforcement is easier and bans actually stick. That step alone has already slowed down several high-profile exploits across PvP zones and the economy system.

This isn’t permanent but don’t expect a quick return

Funcom said the decision isn’t necessarily permanent. If its anti-cheat tools improve, or if Valve introduces better control over how shared accounts behave in multiplayer titles, the feature might return sometime in 2025.

But right now, the studio isn’t promising anything. “We’ll continue to assess the situation,” developers wrote, “but for the foreseeable future, Steam Family Sharing will remain disabled.”

What honest players lose in the shuffle

For regular players, this decision hits households the hardest especially siblings or families who previously shared a copy of Dune: Awakening. Now, every Steam profile will need its own purchase. That’s a steep cost for a game still in early access and under active development.

The change may also affect content creators or testers who used shared profiles for alt characters, exploration builds, or clean slates. Those workflows are now blocked off unless additional copies are bought.

Dune: Awakening’s war on cheating keeps growing

This isn’t Funcom’s first swing at cheaters. Earlier patches targeted speed hacks, dupe glitches, and off-map exploitation. But Steam Family Sharing was harder to block until now.

The studio says its goal is to build a fair sandbox before launch, not patch around problems post-release. That might mean more short-term friction, but it sends a message: if you want to stay in Arrakis, you’ll have to play clean.

Cheaters lost their easy path and Arrakis just got harsher

Steam Family Sharing was a soft backdoor. Now it’s sealed. That may frustrate honest players caught in the blast radius, but Funcom isn’t backing down. On Arrakis, harsh moves are survival and in this war, shortcuts burn fastest.