Entertainment

Why Harry Potter Fans Are Conflicted About The New Hogwarts Game

by Lia Kim  9 September 2022

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Hogwarts Legacy is a new Harry Potter game that has fans counting down to February 10th 2023. 

It’s an open world role-playing game, or RPG, which means you play as a character and explore the world you’re in. In this game, that world is Hogwarts in the late 1800s — yep, another fantasy prequel (looking at you House of the Dragon and Rings of Power).

While this certainly isn’t the first successful Harry Potter video game —this one has upgraded graphics and gameplay — fans are torn over reliving the Hogwarts magic now that the legacy of Harry Potter itself is painfully tainted. 

How Involved Is JK Rowling?

Known best these days for her harmful bigoted opinions, JK Rowling has gone from the most beloved author to a well-known transphobe, whose latest novel includes a person being murdered for transphobia. 

Since the game was announced in late 2020, Warner Bros. has been distancing themselves and the game from the author. One FAQ on the game’s website says that “J.K. Rowling is not involved in the creation of the game, but as creator of the wizarding world and one of the world’s greatest storytellers, her extraordinary body of writing is the foundation of all projects in the Wizarding World”.

The question of whether Rowling will receive royalties remains unanswered — gaming news site Kotaku asked Warner Bros back in 2020, who declined to comment. That pretty much gives an indication that she will likely profit from royalties. 

Fans Are Conflicted

At a loss are fans who are torn on whether to support the game. 

Some want to support the game developers by buying the game, while others point out they’ll get paid anyway and supporting the game means supporting JK Rowling’s intellectual property.

Lead Designer With An Alt-Right YouTube Channel

Unfortunately, JK Rowling’s transphobic views aren’t the only issues linked to the game.

The game’s lead designer Troy Leavitt has a YouTube channel with videos like “In Praise of Cultural Appropriation” and commentary that called the #MeToo movement as a ‘moral panic’.  Leavitt was hired back in February 2018, the same month as when he posted this video saying  Warner Bros knew about his channel and that “it didn’t appear to be an issue for them”.

But after the channel resurfaced from this Twitter thread in 2021, he resigned, tweeting that he’d “made the decision to part ways with Avalanche Software”.

The Pitfalls Of Pre-Orders

As for the game itself, pre-orders opened up only a few weeks ago, and the game has climbed up the sales charts and has sat in the top 10 selling games for the past two weeks. This is pretty wild considering there’s still five months to go before the game is even out yet.

The act of pre-ordering itself has also copped some flack from some critics, who have labelled it as a money making scheme from companies wanting to lock in customers before they can even know if the game is good or not. 

Considering all of this backstory in the lead up to Hogwarts Legacy, will it be successful? Probably, since other Harry Potter stories like Fantastic Beasts and The Cursed Child are still going strong.

Stay tuned for our update in February 2023.