Harry Potter Games Should Pioneer New IP Content, Not Movies

The Harry Potter franchise is in a strange place right now. While the series creator is continuing to use her online presence to spout endless hatred at marginalized groups, and in the process is pushing away more fans by the second, the Wizarding World still remains one of the most profitable franchises in the Western world of entertainment, with theme parks and merchandise all raking in huge profits every day. And in a rather surprising turn of events, Hogwarts Legacy can also be added to that list.

Released back in February of this year, fans and the general gaming community had predicted that Hogwarts Legacy would be a solid hit for the franchise, but many had never expected it would reach the monumental heights it has. Hogwarts Legacy is still currently the best-selling game of 2023, somehow beating out Zelda, Star Wars, Diablo, and more for the top spot. Hogwarts Legacy has been the most successful Wizarding World project in a while, and if it's taught Warner Bros. Anything, it should be that the future of Harry Potter lies in the world of gaming.

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Games Like Hogwarts Legacy Should Continue to Build Out the Wizarding World

During the 2000s and right up until the start of the 2010s, the Harry Potter franchise was easily one of the biggest in the world, with all of its movies and books being worldwide sensations upon their initial release. But once Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 released in 2011, the franchise took a bit of a hiatus. But as is the case with anything successful in the entertainment industry, it's only a matter of time before a sequel or prequel gets made, and that's exactly what happened in 2016 with the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

While the first Fantastic Beasts movie was a solid blockbuster that provided plenty of nostalgia, it didn't perform too well with critics, and that would only be a sign of things to come. With each subsequent sequel, the Fantastic Beasts series has gotten progressively worse, and the box office has followed suit. Now, what was intended to be a five-movie series has been cut short, and the Harry Potter franchise has been left in an almost limbo-like state.

Back in April of this year, HBO announced that it would be producing an ambitious Harry Potter series designed to adapt the entire saga over the course of the next 10 years. While this sounds like an intriguing idea on paper, there are some pretty big criticisms surrounding the project. The tamest criticism surrounding this Harry Potter HBO series is that fans have already seen and read these stories countless times over the last few decades, and they don't really need to see it all again. But some fans believe this series has some more nefarious purposes aside from just milking the series for every last drop. Some fans believe that, as J.K. Rowling is attached as Executive Producer, this series is her attempt to overwrite the movies, as many of the series' stars have been pretty vocal against Rowling's hateful rhetoric.

Though Hogwarts Legacy was obviously still connected to Rowling, she apparently had little to do with the actual creative process, and some fans felt as though that was enough for them to pick up the game. It also helped that Hogwarts Legacy was a genuinely good game, and the first piece of Wizarding World media in a while that actually fleshed out the universe and its history in a meaningful way. Moving forward, it seems like a much smarter move to just let games like Hogwarts Legacy continue to build out the Wizarding World, as opposed to forcing out some disappointing movies, or an overly ambitious TV series that no one really asked for.

Hogwarts Legacy is out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version releasing on November 14.

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