All the way back in August at Gamescom, the new Harry Potter video game was announced: “Hogwarts Legacy.” It is a new and original story from the Harry Potter series that revolves around you being a new Hogwarts student. You get sorted into a house out of pure luck, and you make the decisions which will alternate your story as you go deeper throughout the game. Everybody seemed pretty happy with this idea for a game. 

For a while, the company developing this game, Avalanche Software, continued to release trailers for the game as the hype was being built up by the series’ loyal fans. At this point, everything was fine, until the game was released.

When the game was officially released to the public, people got furious very quickly with the game. I then heard about the fury and the hate the new game was being given. At first, I thought maybe it was the gameplay, maybe the quality, or it could’ve been loyal fans complaining about the inaccuracy to the series. I quickly dove in online to find the root of the issue. My research for this was simply out of curiosity, but I quickly found out the people who were giving this game hate were none other than the Twitter community. 

To my not so much of a surprise, Twitter has found something to complain about once again. Usually, rants on Twitter are just small complaints, but not this time. It spread outside of Twitter, to people shaming and insulting people for simply playing the game. It even got so out of hand, it caused a streamer to quit their entire online career for even mentioning that they were thinking of playing “Hogwarts Legacy.”

I quickly made my way to do research on the actual roots of the problem. I discovered that a while back the creator of the series J.K. Rowling had conveyed her opinion that the LGBTQ+ community wasn’t something she gave support to, with many people accusing her of homophobia, transphobia and other unnecessary insults. So the roots to why the actual game gets hate and shamed has nothing to do with the game or its features, but simply the idea that it had relation to its creator who had an opinion that did not comply with a community of people.

Personally for me, this absolutely boggles my mind, because for a community based around acceptance, they tend to have a hard time accepting opinions that don’t benefit them. This community of people have shamed others multiple times over harmless and unnecessary things before. This is an unnecessary overreaction made by people online. Now, this of course isn’t the first or last time people will overreact negatively about something online.

Shaming people over playing the game should not be the solution to this problem in any way. If you don’t support “Hogwarts Legacy” or J.K. Rowling, the simplest solution would be to not play the game. There’s no reason to shame people over it if they like it. In the end, there isn’t a right or wrong to how you or other people view the game. But what is wrong is letting your feelings fly off the rails and shaming people that want to enjoy a video game.

Overall, the way that things were dealt with was an overreaction in my opinion. Could there have been a different way to handle things? Most definitely. To no surprise, this will not be the last time the internet has an overreaction, but can we improve?