Last year, something happened that hadn’t happened for years – the best-selling game of the year wasn’t Call Of Duty, FIFA, or Grand Theft Auto. It was instead Hogwarts Legacy, the Hogwarts open-world RPG that promised players a way inside the magical world of Harry Potter where they could have their own journey.
So it’s no surprise that, despite Warner Bros. Discovery previously stating that it would be focusing on creating live service games from its biggest IP’s, Harry Potter included, it does still know that it might be a good idea to make a Hogwarts Legacy 2 – or something like it.
In fact chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels identifies making a follow-up or successor to Hogwarts Legacy as “one of the biggest priorities” for WB Discovery.
“Obviously, a successor to ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ is one of the biggest priorities in a couple of years down the road. So there is certainly a significant growth contribution from that [games] business in our strategic outlook here.”
Hogwarts Legacy has sold upwards of 22 million copies sold in 2023, and did something that a brand new single-player game hasn’t done in a long time.
Granted, Hogwarts Legacy is embedded in one of the biggest IP’s worldwide, so it’s not like a totally-totally brand new IP came out and took over the world. But when it had been one of three games for so long, it’s still impressive that anyone beats “the regulars,” as it were, for top-sales charts achievers.
And according to Wiedenfels, we can expect them to try and push something out the door somewhere around 2026. If that happens, that’ll be three years of development time to make what is likely an even bigger game than the previous already big game.
We’ll see how that goes.
Source – [Variety]