In a nuanced blog post, Niantic has announced it’s shutting down its location-based game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
The game will be removed from app stores on December 6th, which is also when IAPs will be removed.
The game will stop working on January 31st 2022, and all social channels will also be shut down.
To some degree though, the only surprise is the game hasn’t been shut down sooner.
Launched back in the summer of 2019, it did around $12 million of revenue in its first month but even before Covid-19 hit, was already experiencing a sharp decline in activity and sales as 2019 came to an end.
Later rather than sooner
Running a global location-based game such as this is an expensive business, even for a company as successful as Niantic.
However, in the closing down blog post, there’s no mention of this trajectory. Instead the framing is that the remaining three months of activity will see the closing of the narrative arc as players “put an end to the Calamity”.
It’s an interesting contextualisation and no doubt has been made alongside IP licensor Warner Bros. and PortKey Games, its game development studio for all things Harry Potter.
Of course, there are plenty of other Harry Potter mobile games available, including NetEase’s Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, which has been one of the biggest hits in China in 2021 and is due to launch internationally in 2022.
