'Hogwarts Legacy' Is the Biggest Game on Twitch -- But It's Facing Culture War Fallout (2024)

Hogwarts Legacy, a hotly anticipated new role-playing video game set in the magical world of Harry Potter, is already breaking records. Its early access launch made it most popular title on the streaming platform Twitch, even before its official Feb. 10 release. But with the fantasy franchise increasingly tarnished by author J.K. Rowling‘s transphobic statements in recent years, the conversation around the game has become a bloodbath of interpersonal politics.

While the makers of Hogwarts Legacy were clearly at pains to distance themselves from Rowling’s history of denigrating trans people, their fig leaf to the community — a non-playable trans woman character with an unfortunately masculine name — has been criticized as cheap pandering. Meanwhile, a fierce debate over the ethics of buying or streaming the game has roiled Twitter, Twitch, Reddit, and Discord. Rowling did not have a development role but will inevitably profit from the product, and some are wary of contributing, however little, to her mind-boggling fortune. Some in this camp have also unfollowed streamers for playing Hogwarts Legacy, or tried to convince them to avoid it altogether.

Much of this debate has happened in Twitch’s gaming community. Streamer Hasan Piker, who streams daily on Twitch for 2.4 million followers, explained on Tuesday that he would not play Hogwarts Legacy so as to avoid being “bullied” and labeled “transphobic” by Rowling’s detractors. When he received pushback on his characterization of potential boycott efforts as “fruitless,” he continued to press the point. Meanwhile, Clara Sorrenti, a Canadian trans woman who streams under the name Keffals, began defending Piker, saying that the furor over Hogwarts Legacy had spoiled an opportunity for charity streams that would’ve raised money for trans people. Keffals — who was forced to go into hiding last year during her campaign to take down the hate forum Kiwi Farms — assured her followers “you aren’t transphobic if you want to play the wizard game” and has considered playing it herself for a charity stream “if other leftist streamers won’t do it.”

While the popularity of the game so far would appear to prove that no major boycott has materialized, it’s not clear that such an action was ever attempted.

“I think those on the right who are gloating that this game is succeeding will always take an opportunity to paint trans people as hysterical and whatever else,” Juniper, a trans creator and co-host of the podcast Western Kabuki, tells Rolling Stone. “But other than some online communities, there’s really not been much, other than some bullying of streamers who have played it, which has really not been widespread at all.” She has planned her own charity stream, of a game called Celeste, which was made by trans women.

A few other social media personalities — including Jenna Lynn Meowri, who has 1.3 million followers and streams to over a quarter million people on Twitch — suggested that people have received “death threats” for playing Hogwarts Legacy, but any evidence of such extreme abuse has been in short supply. LGBTQ people, of course, endure disproportionate and violent online hate speech on an ongoing basis.

Matters are equally contentious, if not more so, on Reddit, where the schism over the video game has led one group to splinter off from the main board for Hogwarts Legacy. The newer subreddit, r/hogwartslegacyJKR, has a pinned set of “Rules” that include: “No pro LGBTQ posting of any kind you will be reported and permanently banned this community is safe and pro man and pro women.” At least one redditor has reported it as a hate post. Others have bombarded the subreddit with the slogan “trans rights are human rights” and spoilers for the game itself. And a user identifying himself as a trans male complained that “people are being douchebags” about Hogwarts Legacy.

“I’m officially distancing myself from the Trans and LGBT+community,” he wrote. “I’m ashamed enough being me, I don’t need to feel even worse for being part of a community who acts like a bunch of Trumpers and Republicans over a f*cking VIDEO GAME.” This post echoed a sentiment shared by many of the game’s defenders — that anyone giving them grief for enjoying the Harry Potter world was “toxic.” On Discord, which also has at least two different servers for discussing Hogwarts Legacy, gamers were similarly dismissive of any controversy. “Every troll on here that’s trying to stop us from enjoying this game is just wasting their time,” one user declared on Thursday.

The aggrieved reaction to any blowback for Rowling or the game is probably overstated, however, as many who play Hogwarts Legacy will never be aware of either. “I do believe on some level that Harry Potter is too large to simply ignore,” Juniper says, adding that there was no chance the game would flop. “It doesn’t help that most people in the general public don’t care about trans people, but at the end of the day, we live in a world where consumerism reigns supreme, everyone has to have the latest thing, and we all know the psychic hold that Harry Potter has on every generation over Gen Z.” The average person, she believes, is not really plugged into the online culture wars — nor are they aware of the extent of Rowling’s association with far-right activists.

Yet some pro-Rowling activists are taking an ideological victory lap. When Hogwarts Legacy debuted, one of its voice actors, Greg Ellis, thanked Rowling personally for the gig. When she thanked him in return, Ellis claimed that he had been previously “canceled” for supporting her and the activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali when the latter defended Rowling from charges of transphobia in 2020. Ellis linked one of his own tweets from that year, in which he predicted the end of “the great wokification of the 2010’s.”

With all this outrage in the air, it’s easy to understand why, for some gamers — despite the multitude of fans who don’t care one way or the other about this stuff — the magic of Harry Potter is long gone.