Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery is a messed up money-grab

You might have heard about the supposed "next Pokemon-Go" mobile game called Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery. It's a free to play mobile game, in which you are allowed to join the Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. Sounds cool right? Yeah, not so much actually, because apparently Hogwarts became a money machine since we last saw it in the movies.

The game 

The game is your standard mobile game, click or swipe to complete actions that allow you to progress through the game. You need energy to do these actions and that energy works like on those facebook games, it refills over time, so you are supposed to just connect once and then to use it up. At first, you progress fairly fast your energy is refilled when you do missions, so using energy gives you back energy, it's a pretty good cycle. You can also buy gold coins for cosmetic items.

You use energy to finish tasks

The cosmetics you can get with coins, which you earn slowly in game

You are not forced to get anything, and it's all cosmetics anyway, it's a business model, right?

The issue

You might be asking yourself, hey, why are you saying it's a money grab? This seems like a pretty much normal business model for a mobile game. Well, this is where we get to the premium currency, gems. You can get those from the store for as low as 1 dollar for 25 gems, which allow you to buy some energy to keep going.

And then you get to the first of a series of encounters that need more than the 24 energy you're provided, encounters like this one, a situation in which your character gets strangled, and you need 29 energy to escape. You regain 1 energy every 4 minutes, so for the last 5 energy, you need to wait 20 minutes, in the middle of a dire situation. This is a predatory micro-transaction system, in a franchise we love.

Allegory of micro-transactions strangling the player

Then, this is where you check the shop, to see how much it would cost you to get past this encounter (there are many others after this one, thanks to those greedy publishers). And you see this :

Hey, only 1 dollar right?

And this :

1 dollar, and you can keep going, great right?

And this is where you realize that everything has been exactly calculated to get you into spending larger and larger amounts of money into this money grab. So, if you're an adult, stay away from this game, there is pretty much no gameplay, and you're better than those shitty anti-consumer tactics. If you have kids, keep them away from those games, or make sure there is no way they can spend money, because I can assure you, those greedy publishers made sure they would want to.

The community has realised this, and a huge backlash is going on right now, which is great, we can't let this kind of stuff become the norm, just like the Battlefront 2 scandal.

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