Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the AR (Augmented Reality) based mobile game released by Niantic, will be removed from all mobile app stores as of December 6, 2021. The company stated that the game will be shut down on January 31, 2022.
Underlining that no in-game purchases will be made as of December 6, Niantic plans to finish the story of the game in a way that will be meaningful to the player base as much as possible. In addition, with the latest update of the game, “Lethal Adversaries”, players will be offered new in-game content until the last day.
Niantic, who could not achieve the great success they had with Pokémon GO in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, made the following statements on the subject:
“Not all games are meant to last forever. Our goal with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite was to bring the magic of the wizarding world to life for millions of players as they stepped outside and explored their neighborhoods. We accomplished that together, delivering a two-year narrative story arc that will soon complete.”
As a Harry Potter fan, it is disappointing to see that Niantic has not been able to reach the targeted amount of players with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, but the fact that such large companies make such decisions also shows that they are in a very right strategic position for the future of the companies.
However, this news does not seem to negatively affect Niantic’s success in the AR space. So much so that the company announced last July that Pokémon GO reached $5 billion in revenue in its fifth year. The game took its place on the list of the highest-grossing mobile games of 2021, earning Niantic about 576 million dollars in the first half of 2021 alone. After the experience with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the developer team underlined that they will apply everything they learned in this project in their next projects. Accordingly, the decision to close can be seen not as a decrease, but as an investment in the future.
There is some data from Sensor Tower about Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. According to this:
- Harry Potter: Wizards Unite has generated 20.3 million downloads worldwide across the App Store and Google Play to date, and accumulated $39.4 million from player spending.
- The No. 1 country for downloads of the game is the United States, where it has generated 6.2 million installs, or 30.7 percent of all downloads. The United Kingdom ranks No. 2, while Germany ranks No. 3.
- The No. 1 country for player spending is also the U.S., where the game has generated $24.5 million, or 62.3 percent of total revenue. Japan ranks No. 2, while the U.K. ranks No. 3.
- So far in 2021, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite has picked up 741,000 installs and $4.7 million from player spending. For comparison, Niantic’s flagship title, Pokémon GO, has generated close to $1.1 billion in revenue in 2021 alone.
Niantic has recently released its brand new AR-based game called “Pikmin Bloom“. In the company’s 2022 plans, 9 new projects are expected to be launched. One of them will be an AR-based (again) Transformers game. The name of the mobile game, in which we will taste the war of giant robots with augmented reality, has been determined as “Transformers: Heavy Metal“. It seems that the company will continue to develop mobile game projects by adapting the popular franchises of the entertainment industry to AR technology. We will be following their success or failure in their 2022 projects.
