Warner Bros. promises more Harry Potter games after huge success of Hogwarts Legacy

Although the final numbers aren't quite in yet, it looks like Hogwarts Legacy, an RPG where players take control of a student at the famous wizarding school from the Harry Potter franchise, will be the best-selling video game of 2023. With 22 million copies sold, 707 million hours played, 819 million potions and 4.9 billion dark wizards defeated (and yes, those are all real data points), the game was a huge success.

Naturally, the folks at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, which published Hogwarts Legacy, want to keep this roll going. We already know there's a Quidditch game on the way, and president David Haddad told Variety that the studio is working on “a series of other things [that]...will let the fans be part of this world and stories and characters in deeper and deeper ways.”

That's consistent with marching order from Warner Bros. Discovery, which wants to focus on franchises. “There’s a unique and important role games have in keeping our franchises relevant, resonant and exciting because there’s plenty of fans and plenty of people consuming content where games are their starting point, it’s their preferred form of content,” Haddad said.

That's about what you'd expect to hear from a studio executive -- of course they want to focus on franchises and maximize returns. In addition to more Harry Potter games, Warner Bros. is working on a Wonder Woman game as well as other games based on an upcoming reboot of the DC Cinematic Universe. A new game called Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League comes out on February 2.

One can take this kind of thing too far. During Warner Bros. Discovery’s earnings call in November, CEO David Zaslav said that he wanted to focus on "more always-on game play through live services, multi-platform and free-to-play extensions with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms." Unlike Hogwarts Legacy, which is a game you buy, play, and then leave when you're done, a live service games are usually free to play but involve micro-transactions, season passes, and other revenue-generating methods which have gotten a lot of flack among gamers in recent years. That Suicide Squad game hews much closer to this model, and has come under a lot of criticism in the lead-up to release.

So it remains to be seen whether a game like that can measure up to the success of Hogwarts Legacy, or if there's something special about a single-player Harry Potter experience. Hogwarts Legacy endured some controversy too, but it was of a very different kind; some fans were upset about the Harry Potter brand getting any kind of exposure given that the franchise was originally created by author J.K. Rowling, who in recent years has made headlines for her transphobic activism. Avalanche Software, the studio behind the game, tried to distance Hogwarts Legacy from Rowling's bigotry; for instance, they included a sympathetic trans character in the game, something Rowling would surely have disapproved of.

Whether this back-and-forth had any effect on sales, we don't know. But we do know that Hogwarts Legacy is a smash, which means more Harry Potter games in the future.

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