When 'Harry Potter' Taught Kids About E-Commerce (By Choking Them)

Let’s go back to 2018, a time when finding Harry Potter-adjacent dirt that wasn’t 100% caused by J.K. Rowling proved more challenging than nowadays. That surprisingly distant-feeling year saw the release of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, a mobile game that’s probably about solving the mystery of how to steal your parents’ credit card in order to buy more play tokens.

Hogwarts Mystery, unlike Candy Crush, doesn’t just wait as it correctly assumes that players will insert another e-coin as soon as they can. Mystery shows a tree strangling a kid until players pay up.

Jam City

Fun Pottermore trivia: You’d think a wizard’s neck would go SNAP!, but it actually goes TERF!

In this game, the character runs on the oh-so-magical meter of “energy,” something that’s engineered to get depleted very quickly. Look, we get it; we feel tired just thinking about it, but this prompts our characters – who all look like children – to be caught by a tree that’ll strangle them for an hour and a half unless they pay. You’d think that the controversy generated by this, combined with how you’ve probably never heard about this game, caused it to go under fast, but the tree racketeering simulator is making big bucks. Yeah, this is a small indie game that *checks notes* only made over 100 million in revenue a year after release. Who knows how much it’s at now.

When 'Harry Potter' Taught Kids About E-Commerce (By Choking Them)
Source: Pinoy Daily News