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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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HogLeg's success is pretty crazy if you think about it. Ignoring the sales we've looking at today, take yourself back to the launch of HogLeg. It kept up pace with Fallout 4 in terms of active players and achievement completion rates. This is huge to me. They're both singleplayer RPGs, so they're both vying for the same type of audience.
But.
Fallout 4 was a hugely anticipated sequel to one of the most renowned series in all of gaming. Harry Potter had almost no presence in gaming beyond nostalgic shovel ware titles.
Fallout 4 was developed by gaming darlings, a company known for producing huge open worlds with strong volumes of content. HogLeg was developed by shovelware developers with no major releases in their history.
Fallout 4 is a first person looter shooter, one of the most ubiquitous and successful genres out there. HogLeg is an action roleplaying game, still admittedly a safe genre but doesn't have the genre conventions that makes it possible for anyone with FPS experience to pick up a Fallout.
And finally, Fallout 4 targeted gamers. It's a gamer's game, you know? It's for lore nerds and RPG fans and tacticool nuts and all the rest. HogLeg was for Harry Potter fans. It needed to drag fans across media types to secure a big enough audience.
I truly, truly did not expect HogLeg to find the success it has. And to be honest, it's quite a mid game! It's a visual accomplishment and adherence to the universe means that it's a treat for any Harry Potter nerds, but the rest of the game is as close as generic as it could get.
This is... perhaps, the very formula for its success. Perhaps the gaming crowd isn't that big. Perhaps, HL was not chained to a particular demographic and instead had the freedom to appeal to a wider audience.
I know of people who picked up a controller for the first time in their life because HL was a Harry Potter game... just saying.
Yeah, I feel like their logic is circular. Choosing to actively ignore the fact that the game is based off one of the most popular book series in the entire world is frustratingly dense, and feels like they're stanning for the sake of it. From what I understand, the game is ridiculously repetitive, and is genuinely riding solely off of the popularity of the book series.
Wow. Good comparison. Didn't realize how close they were. In both being average games too.