Hogwarts Legacy Should Be Judged By Its Own Merits

Hogwarts Legacy has come out to critical acclaim for its gameplay and world, giving fans of the Wizarding World a chance to finally live out their fantasies of being a Hogwarts student. However, this has also resulted in backlash, all because of one thing: the game is based on the Wizarding World, created by a known-terrible person (sigh) J.K. Rowling who I will not call by name any further because they disgust me in many ways.

Now, let’s clear up the misconceptions. Yes, the author has made money off this game from licensing and will get royalties from sales. It’s unfortunate but there’s nothing that can be done as she makes money from anything related to her books, and there are still a lot of fans of the Wizarding World. At the very least the author was not creatively involved with the project in any way, and the developer Avalanche has made it clear over the months leading up to launch that it does not support the author’s views. Avalanche should be commended for making such an amazing game many can enjoy, while also dealing with the amount of hate and vitriol directed towards it. Avalanche shouldn’t be apologetic, it should be proud because it’s obvious the developer loves the source material and have gone to great lengths to ensure that it is respected.

Also, attacking streamers who want to play the game does not do anything productive. You are not hurting the author, you’re hurting the player. Shelby of Girlfriend Reviews cried on a recent stream because of the amount of hate in the chat. Pikamee of VOMS Project, one of the nicest Vtubers on YouTube, had to cancel her stream of the game just because of the amount of toxic comments and harassment she received on her Twitter and her pre-chat stream. This insanity does not help anyone, especially the trans community. This hateful crowd may be the vocal minority, but humans aren’t built to handle hundreds or thousands of voices. It’s why cyberbullying is such a serious problem, and people have killed themselves over toxic comments. The words you use are just as effective as a gun, and how you use those words can be the difference between protecting someone or killing them.

Hogwarts Legacy’s backlash is the perfect example of what not to do when fighting for your cause. Bullies are bullies, and harassing someone over playing a game is no better than the author’s actions. If you don’t want to support the author, then there’s no one making you, but it doesn’t give you the right to bully people into not having fun with a product they spent their hard-earned money on. Using hate as a weapon won’t win over the crowd. Use understanding, empathy, kindness, and knowledge to combat ignorance and hate or else you’re making more enemies against your cause than allies for it. And at worst, you just convinced someone to buy a copy.

Here’s the kicker to all this, this was all happening before the game officially released on the 10th of February 2023. Not only that, Hogwarts Legacy sold 13 million across all platforms through pre-orders alone. Make of that what you will.

At the end of the day, games are supposed to be fun and you should let people have fun. They're interactive art, and should be separated from the artist because as soon as it’s out in the world, it’s up to the consumer to decide what it means and if it fulfills their objective. Death of the Author, anyone? This is why I believe Hogwarts Legacy should be judged by its own merits, because using hate, harassment and bullying makes you no better than the people you’re trying to defeat.