Hogwarts Legacy earns biggest launch ever for Warner Bros Games
The game has made nearly a billion dollars for its creators—including, obviously, J.K. Rowling
It’s like the old proverb says: Nobody ever went broke selling wizard shit to nerds. That’s (sort of) per Variety, which reports that Warner Bros. Games’ new J.K. Rowling-based video game, Hogwarts Legacy, is the best-selling title in WBG’s history, beating out not just one, but two Happy Feet-based video games, and also some other titles that are actually good. And all it took was a massive marketing push attached to one of the most lucrative brands on the planet. Who’d a thunk?
Warner Bros. Discovery sent out a press statement celebrating this extremely short putt earlier today, stating that the game made $850 million in its first two week of sales (representing roughly 12 million copies sold), while also setting a record for hours streamed on Twitch for a single-player game. Also, they unleashed this pile of brand-intensive nonsense, which someone presumably got paid an ungodly amount of money to write: “Additionally, there has been an increase of global franchise fan engagement overall with Wizarding World Digital garnering 300% higher traffic over the normal monthly unique visitor average for the first 10 days of February.”
The upshot is: Despite the controversy surrounding the game—which saw studio Avalanche make some blanket statements that Rowling, with her recent quadruple-downing on transphobic rhetoric, was not involved its creation (besides, obviously, profiting massively off of it)—it has sold very well, because Harry Potter stuff always sells well. (And better, typically, the less involved the author is these days; looking at you, Fantastic Beasts And How To Sleep Through Them.)
As we noted in our review, Hogwarts Legacy has players do most of those things they might expect to do in a Harry Potter video game, including flying broomsticks across a big ol’ map, attending classes, and trying not to think too much about the implications of how Rowling designed, say, the setting’s goblin residents. The game was released back on February 10.