Niantic closes the Harry Potter: Wizards Unite AR game. Perhaps because of low revenue

Niantic has decided to no longer support the augmented reality game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The project will be removed from mobile stores on December 6, and the servers will be turned off on January 31, 2022.

“Not all games have to live forever,” the company wrote on its blog. “We wanted Harry Potter: Wizards Unite to allow millions of players to experience the magic of the wizarding world when they go outside and explore the surroundings. To do this, we came up with a story that lasted two years and will soon come to an end.”

The developer intends to hold events in the AR-game until its closure. In addition, Niantic promises to give gamers a number of bonuses. For example, already now daily tasks should bring more rewards, and potions should be prepared faster.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite was released in June 2019. According to Sensor Tower analysts, since then the AR-game has earned $39.4 million and collected 20.3 million downloads. As for separately 2021, from January to November, users downloaded Harry Potter: Wizards Unite 741 thousand times, spending $ 4.7 million. Note that the data takes into account only Google Play and the App Store, but the project is also in the Galaxy Store.

Nevertheless, it is much more modest than that of another AR-game studio — Pokémon GO. It earned $1.1 billion in 2021 alone, and its total revenue since its release in 2016 was $5.5 billion.

By the way, a significant gap in game revenue has been observed since the release of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Recall that in the debut month, the Harry Potter title earned $12 million — 25 times less than during the same period of Pokémon GO.

Despite the closure of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the company has no plans to abandon augmented reality games. Last week, Niantic, together with Nintendo, released Pikmin Bloom, and at the end of the year it is going to publish Transformers: Heavy Metal.