GOG details the licensing split around classic Dune 2

A GOG partnerships manager has spelled out why Westwood Studios’ 1992 real-time strategy game Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty remains stuck off modern storefronts: the rights do not sit with one owner.¹

Marcin Paczynski, senior business development and partnerships manager at the PC store, walked through the tangle in an interview with GamesRadar. Kotaku carried that account in a Monday report and flagged the same piece on X.¹²

Paczynski’s core point was simple on paper and messy in practice. Electronic Arts holds the game code, the assets, and the rights to those materials. EA does not own the Dune IP.¹

The IP problem starts with the source material. The Westwood games were not based on Frank Herbert’s books. They followed the 1984 movie. Universal Pictures made that film. Dino De Laurentiis was the main producer and kept part of the movie license. He died 15 years ago. His estate still owns a portion of Dune 2, Paczynski said.¹

A later deal adds another layer. Legendary Pictures owns the IP rights for the new Dune movies and has an arrangement with Funcom on Dune Awakening, a survival game set in that universe. Paczynski said the deal includes some exclusivity. Whether that exclusivity would block a re-release of Westwood’s classic Dune games, including Dune 2000, is currently not clear.¹

For Paczynski the title is personal as well as professional. He ranks Dune 2 among the games he most wants GOG to bring back and preserve. “It’s on the top of my list, my personal one,” he said, tying the wish to his own nostalgia. He framed the case as a plain example of how severe a game’s licensing situation can become.¹

Dune 2 was not the first real-time strategy game, yet it helped set the pattern later studios used. The build and assets sit with EA. A slice of the movie-era license sits with a producer’s estate. A newer film-and-game pact adds exclusivity no one has fully sorted in public. That is the map GOG is working from.¹

Our read: Paczynski’s rundown shows a classic caught between game assets and film IP that never lined up under one roof. EA can hold the code and still lack a clean license to ship it; the De Laurentiis estate’s portion and the Legendary-Funcom exclusivity leave the re-release question open. Until those pieces move together, the title GOG ranks as a personal top target stays offline. The next hard fact to watch is any clear word on whether the Awakening deal actually bars the Westwood games.

Footnotes

1. kotaku.com, “GOG explains licensing hell for classic PC game”. Retrieved November 2, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. X, “Posts on X from @Kotaku, @Kotaku”. Retrieved November 2, 2026. ↩