WHY?! WHY ARE THEY BEING SO STUPID WITH HOGWARTS?!
They built this whole world into the game and did NOTHING with it! It's empty! Hogwarts the settings is perfect! The castle was fun to walk around in, to explore! I 100%'d the game because I loved exploring in it! Then they did nothing else to the game. I don't even remember what the antagonist's name was!
The game oversold all expectations! People just loved shelling out money for it! Then WB just dropped it.
I see things bitching every day about how their game studios don't make enough money and then they shit the bed here by just letting that game sit here!
If they're actually worried about money why are they not cranking out DLC every 4-6 months?! People would buy it! The world they built is begging to have more stories told, and people are holding out their wallets asking for more content for it - and they cancel it?!? They can't bitch and moan that games don't make money and then they just flip the off switch on their freaking money printer.
WB doesn't seem to know how to release any media post 2010.
They keep trying to shoehorn IP into trends, years after market saturation to try and capture nostalgia, and then wonder why they didn't meet sales targets. See MK1, Space Jam 2, or anything related to HP or LotR.
The other thing they do is when they do have an interesting or original idea with the IP, the executive team seems too risk averse to put any capital behind it. See the two new Loony Tunes movies, one was in theaters for less than a week and the other was scrapped entirely for a tax writeoff.
It's genuinely baffling watching WB just make like, every wrong decision. Their business is losing money and every time a project that receives praise or interest is announced/released that is nearly guaranteed to make them lots of money.They just don't go through with it. Or they do some work on it then can it.
It's like, even out of touch executives at other large companies have enough feelers to find out generally what people are enjoying. Then with all their money they throw something in that general direction and something eventually sticks.
With WB though it's like, nothing is working. The things that do stick don't make as much as they thought. And the things that they don't think will make money do make money, often more than they thought... And then they just always find a way to either piss off everyone, sour and sabotage the future projects, or just don't do anything with it.
It's just so fucking weird. Like I don't even enjoy or partake in most of the stuff WB puts out. But sitting on the sidelines and just watching it all unfold makes me question what drugs the leaders at the company are on...
It's been especially bad over the last year. WB is in freefall at this point.
It seems it would be pretty easy to blame this on David Zaslav, but the games department specifically has been fucking up like never before: Mortal Kombat, Multiversus, Gollum, Kill the Justice League. Just name a WB game that came out, and it's been an abysmal failure, with similar games from other studios doing much much better.
They also closed Monolith, a great studio behind e.g. FEAR amd Shadow of Mordor games. They are making all the wrong decisions, and then will wonder why they have lost to competitors.
They didn't make another because they were forced to make a game that was Wonder Woman and live service. How does that work? Clearly they didn't know either since they spun their wheels for like seven years, lost all their old staff, and then got shut down.
Seeing how the game prominently features trans characters and that Rowling wasn't involved in making it, it probably doesn't bother many people.
I want to support media that show and empathize with trans people, and Hogwarts is one of them. But yes, even though she was not involved, she surely is receiving some royalties due to the setting.
hogwarts is not the place to do that then. there are plenty of other queer games out there to support queer game dev. instead of pretending that giving money to rowling is doing anything to support trans people.
Rowling having slightly more money makes no difference to her spewing her views, she is set for life anyway. Yes I'd like to avoid giving her money, but a much stronger signal I'd like to send is that a game with trans characters sells well.
it means nothing besides them trying to profit from the nostalgia ridden queers. again, yall could support actual queer works instead of work with a thin veneer of it.
I am aware the motives behind it are profit driven. But that doesn't make the message less valuable. People seeing themselves represented is helpful to them, and it normalizes them for other people.
oh boy! they see themselves in games while they're literally getting depersoned by the politics of the creator! in a time where we are literally seeing what such wealth is able to enable you to do... literally buy the white house.
Rowling has enough money to donate to shitty politics for the rest of her life ten times over.
Attempts to "not support her" are about 3 decades too late and entirely irrelevant at this point beyond making people feel good about themselves. She doesn't need your support nor even registers it.
We're talking about the world's first and only writer to become a billionaire with her books here.
Oh shit, the tone police are here. I'm not under the impression the person I'm responding to is going to change their behavior after this has already been widely talked about to death for years, and so I really don't care what tone I use. This person is helping make the lives of real, actual, perfectly innocent trans people (and especially the lives of trans women) hell because they a) don't care about those people or somehow more pathetically b) do care but can't restrain themselves from buying themselves a children's toy to that end.
They could've been making GTA levels of money. Soooo many people were able to overlook the terribleness of the author just to be able to be in the Harry Potter world.
They're still moving forward with the sequel (at least according to the article), so if I had to guess they figured they missed the boat with the expansion and want to focus on the sequel instead.
Which is fine, but I have no idea why they're just throwing everything they have in the trash. They built the whole world and just sat on it. Expansions could make them so much money to fund the next game in the short term
Yeah, I was surprised given the success that they didn't even spit out something to keep people engaged with the game. Seemed like even a small content update or doc would have pulled people in.
Hopefully it just means the follow-up will be even better.
Seriously they could have done sims level DLC and people could have just kept buying. New mounts, small new areas, bits of story here and there, a new class
(please do not support TERF content, pirate it if you really want to nostalgia bait yourself)
because dlc is not something you just "do". it's something of a scale and complexity that needs to be planned out from the go. If the dev team is allowed to cook you might get an Assassin's creed 2 situation. but this company will almost certainly not allow that to happen.
(please do not support TERF content, pirate it if you really want to nostalgia bait yourself)