Harry Potter: Wizards Unite the augmented reality mobile game is going to be officially shut down on January 31, 2022. The game will be removed from App store, Google Play and Galaxy Store on December 6, 2021. The reason for the removal is not specified yet.
Wizards Unite is an AR based mobile game which pits the players into an exciting game against dark Wizards and magical beasts to save their liked characters from the Harry Potter book series. The players could feel like real world locations and indulge in activities like potion brewing, spell casting, searching for mysterious artefacts and enjoy the feeling of being in the Harry Potter universe.
But unfortunately, “Not all games are meant to last forever,” said Niantic. “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 neighbourhoods. We accomplished that together, delivering a two-year narrative story arc that will soon complete.”
Niantic and Warner Bros Games have made a blog post mentioning the official shutting down of the game. The game was released in 2019 after the success of its predecessor, Pokémon GO but the results of it were not even comparable to Pokémon GO and the cost of maintainence was high. Niantic recently pulled the plug of one more game CATAN World Explorers claiming that it was difficult to adapt it to real world location MMO so shutting off the Harry potter game is not much shocking.
In defense, Niantic stated, “Our goal is to deliver the best experiences to you, our players, based on our pillars of exploration, exercise and real-world social interaction. We’ll take all of the learnings from Harry Potter: Wizards Unite into our other projects.”
There are going to be some in-game events in November and December to complete the story arc before the end of the game. Daily tasks will see an increment, potion brew will reduce several times, more portkeys , limitless sending or receiving gifts and many more as stated in a post on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite website. There will not be any in-app purchases allowed after 6th December 2021 but the users can continue to play the game till 31st January 2022 so they have time to use up any balance or possessions they own in the game.
