Just over a year after the international release of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, publisher Warner Bros. has announced that the game will be discontinued in the Americas, Europe and Oceania in October.
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened took a circuitous route to make it to PC. It was released on mobile in China and Taiwan in 2021, and then released worldwide in July 2023, including for Windows – although servers for the PC version were limited to Southeast Asia.
That doesn’t seem to be a real problem though – I downloaded the official PC client today to see how it works and the game ran fine – except that NetEase and Warner operate their own separate account systems: you can’t link a WB-operated mobile account (which you use when you’re outside of Asia) to a NetEase-operated PC account.
This all seems unnecessarily complicated, but that doesn’t matter now. In June 2023, Warner said it was “finalizing development on a PC version of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened and will announce further release details as they become available,” but now that’s all off the table.
“It is time for Harry Potter: Magic Awakened to officially close its servers in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania on October 29, 2024,” reads a shutdown notice on magicawakened.com. “The game will continue to be available to players in Asia, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, as well as other select territories in Asia and MENA.”
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened has already been removed from the App Store and Google Play and in-game purchases are no longer possible. The game itself will continue as usual until October 29th.
But there may be a way out, at least for PC gamers. Warner’s website, magicawakened.com, isn’t busy, but if you check out harrypottermagicawakened.com you’ll find much more detailed information about the game and a working link to the PC client. Since the servers are run by NetEase, they’ll presumably still be up and running.
Some players on Reddit are considering switching to the NetEase servers, but this is widely seen as an imperfect solution, as it means a complete loss of progress made so far. Due to separate account systems, characters and items – some of which cost a lot of money – will not transfer over. A few optimists are hoping that NetEase will open at least a few servers in North America and Europe, but that seems unlikely; a far more common reaction among players is, well, one might say, not very Potter-like:
The failure of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened stands in sharp contrast to Hogwarts Legacy, the game Warner touted as “the best-selling game of the year across the industry worldwide” in early 2024. But since then, Warner has been in something of a free fall: Ironically, the studio said in March that it wanted to increase its focus on “free-to-play mobile and cross-platform” games following the disastrous flop of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, with a particular emphasis on its four core franchises: Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, DC, and Harry Potter. And yet here we have just that—a free-to-play Harry Potter game for mobile and PC that, based on my few minutes of play, 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 have contacted Warner Bros and NetEase for more information on the cancellation of Harry Potter: Magic Awakened and whether the game will continue to be playable on PC via the SEA servers. I will provide an update if I receive a response.
