NetEase will continue to operate the free-to-play Potter game in Asia, but its days are numbered everywhere else.
Just over a year after Harry Potter: Magic Awakened launched internationally, publisher Warner Bros has announced that the game will be shut down in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania in October.
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened took a twisting path to get to PC. It launched in China and Taiwan in 2021 on mobile devices, and then went global in July 2023, including on Windows—although the servers for the PC version were limited to Southeast Asia.
That doesn’t really seem like a deal-breaker—I downloaded the official PC client earlier today to see what it was like, and the game ran fine—except that NetEase and Warner run their own separate account systems: You cannot link a WB-operated mobile account (which is what you’re using if you’re located outside of Asia) to a NetEase-operated PC account.
It all seems unnecessarily complicated, but it doesn’t matter now. In June 2023 Warner said it was “finalizing the development of a PC version of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened and will share more details on its release when available,” but now that’s all off the table.
“The time has come for Harry Potter: Magic Awakened to officially close its servers in the Americas, Europe and Oceania territories on October 29, 2024,” a shutdown message at magicawakened.com states. ”The game will continue to be available for players in Asia, including Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, as well as other select Asia and MENA territories.”
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened has already been removed from the App Store and Google Play, and in-game purchases are no longer available. The game itself will continue to run as normal until October 29.
But there may be an out, for PC players at least. Warner’s magicawakened.com website doesn’t have much going on, but if you pop over to harrypottermagicawakened.com you’ll find much more detailed information about the game and a working link to the PC client. Because its servers are run by NetEase, they’ll presumably continue to operate.
Some players on Reddit are musing about switching over to NetEase servers, but that’s widely seen as an imperfect solution because it means a complete loss of progress earned so far. Due to separate account systems, characters and items—some of which cost a lot of money—will not transfer over. An optimistic few are holding out hope that NetEase will open at least a few servers in North America and Europe, but that doesn’t seem likely; a far more common reaction among players is, well, you might say not very Potter-like:
(Yes, I have stitched these together for effect.) (Image credit: Reddit)
The failure of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened stands in sharp contrast to Hogwarts Legacy, the game Warner trumpeted at the start of 2024 as “the best-selling game of the year in the entire industry worldwide.” But Warner’s been in something of a freefall since then: Ironically, the studio said in March that after the disastrous flop of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it wanted to increase its focus on “mobile and multi-platform free-to-play” games, with particular emphasis on its four core franchises: Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, DC, and Harry Potter. And yet here we have exactly that—a mobile and PC free-to-play Harry Potter game that, based on my very few minutes of playing with it, looked like a passably decent wizarding experience—and WB is pulling the plug after a year. I guess there are no sure things after all.
I’ve reached out to Warner Bros and NetEase for more information on the Harry Potter: Magic Awakened shutdown, and whether it will remain playable on PC via SEA servers, and will update if I receive a reply.
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