Hogwarts Legacy: Everyone Relax

The Hogwarts legacy game has been a massive hit since its release in February. Along with the game becoming the biggest single player game on Twitch came a lot of criticism. The game revolves around Harry Potter, so it was obviously going to be a big hit, as it is one of the biggest franchises ever. The controversy has undoubtedly, however, brought more eyes to the game.

The Issue

A lot of people are upset about the Hogwarts Legacy game because the author and creator of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, was recently found to have made anti-trans comments. Rowling is openly against the movement and has doubled down on her claims and has made it clear she does not care what people think or say of her.

Many are angry with the Hogwarts Legacy game because Rowling is gaining royalties from the game due to owning the intellectual property of the Harry Potter series, but she truly has no real connection to the game and was not involved in the process of making it in any way. Some, however, are still claiming that people that buy the game are “transphobic” simply because Rowling is the creator of the Harry Potter series.

Cancel Culture

Now that the Hogwarts game has been released and has been such a massive success, there is a contingency of people that feel it is their job to cancel those who choose to buy, play, stream, or post videos about the game.

Streamers

Many streamers have given in to the heat of the angry mob, and quite a few big streamers have announced they won’t be playing the game because they don’t want to receive any hate, get bullied, or worse, be canceled.

A few clips have gone viral recently of chats in streams getting overly toxic. One showed a man and woman, presumably a couple, playing the game on stream, and as the chat got excessively toxic, the woman began to cry and wanted to end the stream. This type of pressure from the community of gamers isn’t something that will attract people to video games or Esports.

How to Move Forward

This type of guerilla warfare on streamers isn’t something the gaming community should accept, and Twitch should be able to help streamers in certain circumstances to protect them from unwanted spam and traffic on their streams. Just as much as Twitch likes to protect its image by what gets put on its platform, it should also care about the content creators themselves, who make the platform all that it is.