Hogwarts Legacy is based on the Wizarding World universe created by J.K. Rowling. You can read more about Rowling’s history of transphobic remarks as well as find resources to support LGBTQ organizations here.
Hogwarts Legacy‘s initial sales numbers have just been revealed, and they tell a pretty clear story about just how popular the game has been.
Warner Bros. Games has confirmed via press release that Hogwarts Legacy has sold over 12 million units in its first two weeks and has generated over $850 million in sales revenue during that same time period. According to the studio, that makes the game WB Game’s biggest launch ever.
Remarkably, the records don’t stop there. WB also revealed that Hogwarts Legacy has been played for over 280 million hours to date. If you break that down equally among those 12 million copies sold (which is obviously a pretty crude method), that would mean that the average buyer has spent about 23 hours playing the game so far. That’s an impressive figure for a modern single-player game. Of course, that figure kind of makes sense when you consider that WB also revealed that Hogwarts Legacy attracted 1.28 million concurrent viewers on Twitch at one point, which is a new record for a single-player game on that streaming platform.
While two-week sales figures throughout history can be a little tough to come by so long after the fact, it’s clear that these figures put Hogwarts Legacy in some pretty elite company. For instance, Elden Ring sold 13.4 million copies in its first month of release, which Hogwarts legacy will almost certainly surpass. Cyberpunk 2077 reportedly sold about 13.7 million units in its first three weeks of availability, and Hogwarts Legacy could certainly still surpass that. While Hogwarts Legacy probably won’t reach Skyrim’s impressive $1 billion first-month revenue figure (despite being a more expensive game) or challenge some of GTA 5‘s shocking sales records, the game is a hit no matter how you look at it.
What’s really crazy is that Hogwarts Legacy‘s initial sales could have easily been even better. After all, the game is still not available for PS4, Xbox One, or Nintendo Switch. If it had been released on all of those platforms a the same time, there’s no telling what these initial sales figures would have looked like.
The only grains of salt worth mentioning from a pure numbers perspective is the fact that Hogwarts Legacy did experience a reported 66% drop in physical sales in the UK in its second week. That isn’t unusual by any means but it’s going to be interesting to see if Hogwarts Legacy‘s pre-orders end up carrying most of the weight or if word-of-mouth will keep sales strong. Along those same lines, it’s worth noting that those who pre-ordered the more expensive ($79.99) Deluxe Edition of Hogwarts Legacy got to start playing the game 72 hours ahead of its official release date. That kind of incentive attached to the premium edition of the game almost certainly bolstered early revenue figures so far as records go.
Even still, there’s no denying that Hogwarts Legacy is a massive hit. While the box office returns of the recent Fantastic Beast movies (despite their…quality), suggested that there was still a ton of life left in the Wizarding World franchise, Hogwarts Legacy really shows the ongoing appeal of that license when it’s attached to a good adaptation.
Of course, the elephant in the room remains the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling and, in this instance, how that controversy led to protests and boycotts of Hogwarts Legacy itself. There will undoubtedly be some who will look at these sales figures and dismiss such efforts outright. It’s certainly clear that Hogwarts Legacy was an objective success despite those protests and may have garnered additional attention (and perhaps additional sales) because of them.
However, many of those speaking out against the game have made it clear that they really wanted to be heard and wanted to ensure that the conversations about this game weren’t ultimately reduced to the sales figures you see above or even the game itself. There was little doubt that this game was going to be successful. Perhaps not this successful, but successful nonetheless. In a way, though, it’s perhaps telling that so many people’s minds will jump to those protests, boycotts, and concerns when they see these figures.
In any case, this is obviously good news for developer Avalanche Software, WB Games, and the future of Harry Potter games in general. So far as that goes, we don’t really know what’s next for any of those things. Avalanche has said that they have no current plans to develop DLC for Hogwarts Legacy, but we don’t know if that means they’ll be working on a sequel instead. For that matter, there’s also been no word regarding any future Harry Potter games WB may have planned, though it would obviously be shocking to learn that Hogwarts Legacy is the only Harry Potter game they intend to release in the next few years.