Harry Potter: Wizards Unite launched this past week, making the first follow up to Pokémon Go from Niantic. It is a tough task to follow up what was at one point a genuine cultural phenomenon, but WB and Niantic were betting big that Harry Potter would be the license to do it. If that is to be the case, it wasn’t at launch, as Wizards Unite launched at a fraction of Pokémon Go, but still quite alright revenue.
According to app monitoring site SensorTower, the magic-casting game hit around $300,000 in revenue in the first 24 hours. That’s not a bad check for the first day. However, based on their data, Wizards Unite was at about 400,000 installs between the U.S. and U.K. in those same 24 hours. To contrast, Pokémon Go was at about 7.6 million installs in that same time frame. Though the comparison isn’t entirely fair, Pokémon Go didn’t launch in the U.K. for another week.
SensorTower also lists Pokémon Go’s first-day revenue as $2 million.
There could be a number of reasons for this. The novelty of the first time is the most obvious, as Wizards Unite is quite similar to Pokémon Go, and players who have already experienced the augmented reality technology may not feel the need to immediately jump into Wizards Unite. Another could be that Pokémon Go fans just don’t need to move on to a second game that mostly offers a new license. Pokémon is also just a bigger license and took better advantage of nostalgia by launching with the first generation of Pokémon, so that no doubt contributes.
That said, it’s been a lot more than just one day. Wizards Unite can pull it together and the app store is littered with games that initially launched to muted receptions but became huge after.
[Source: SensorTower]
