Overview
- GOG senior business manager Marcin Paczynski said in early November that efforts to bring back Westwood’s 1992 Dune II are stalled by a five-way split of rights.
- Electronic Arts owns the Dune II game code, assets and developer-side rights after buying Westwood in 1998 but does not control the underlying Dune intellectual property.
- The original games were licensed from the 1984 film rather than Frank Herbert’s novels, which separates film-linked rights held by Universal and the De Laurentiis successor from the Herbert Foundation’s book rights.
- Legendary Pictures granted Funcom a licence to make new Dune games and that deal appears to include exclusivity, and it is currently unclear whether that exclusivity would block re-releases of older titles.
- GOG says the legal complexity and the prospect of modest sales make multi-party deals hard to justify, leaving preservation dependent on long negotiations or unofficial fan efforts.