Harry Potter Wizards Unite was a video game released in 2019 and shut down in early 2022. The game was a collaboration between Pottermore and the video game company Warner Brothers Interactive and was supposed to rival that of Pokémon Go! The game was also developed under Portkey Games, the same distributor as Hogwarts Mystery and is an AR project.
Development for Harry Potter: Wizards Unite started in 2017, and the game announcement was in 2018. Upon the game’s release, it got average reviews based off fifteen reviews.
In the first month of release in June 2019 (in the US and UK), the game only made US$ 12 million, per the website Games Industry. Harry Potter Wizards Unite’s revenue fell behind what Pokémon Go made in its first month, about US$300million.
Even the amount of downloads for Harry Potter Wizards Unite was down compared to Pokémon Go. Wizards Unite had only 15 million downloads compared to the 182 million that Pokémon Go had.
Different Reasons Why Harry Potter Wizards Unite Shut Down
There were likely different factors as to why Harry Potter Wizards Unite was shut down when it was. It could’ve been oversaturation of the Harry Potter franchise at the time. While it has been noted that the Wizarding World is a much bigger brand than Pokémon, it is possible that the game was aimed at the male populace rather than the female one because Harry Potter has more female fans.
According to the Wizarding World forum, The Leaky Cauldron, there was a ton of news over 2019 including several video gams releases outside of Harry Potter Wizards unite.
Finally, we must point out that the game was a cut-and-paste copy of Pokémon Go but for Harry Potter fans. While it did outsell other games like Ghostbusters World, which got far fewer downloads, it didn’t do enough to stay relevant in the market of mobile video games.
