Jam City talks Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery’s seventh anniversary and the power of storytelling

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery celebrated its seventh anniversary on April 25th, 2025, reaching a pivotal number in the wizarding world that’s sparked a special celebration and marketing campaign.

A Jam City title with a licence from Warner Bros., Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery first launched in the vastly different mobile games landscape of 2018 and has survived through the rise and fall of various genres, the global pandemic and its turbulent aftermath, and more.

And while Harry Potter is a world-renowned IP with plenty of brand power behind it, it’s far from a magical ingredient guaranteeing success. Rather, it appears that much of Hogwarts Mystery’s longevity can be attributed to its story, compelling players to invest for the long haul.

That strategy seems to have paid off, with Sensor Tower reporting that Hogwarts Mystery surpassed $500 million in gross revenue last year.

Sitting down with Jam City general manager Bryan Shaw and product lead Nicole Adams, we find out more about the game and its seventh anniversary, quickly learning that immersion, loveable characters and bespoke brand alignment are intrinsic elements in this melting pot.

But how, exactly, do these intersect in a Harry Potter game without the titular wizard himself in sight?

Harry-less Potter and the power of a story

From the beginning, the crux of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery has been delivering an immersive, authentic Hogwarts experience. When first starting the game, players begin in their first year at the wizarding school and gradually progress from pre-teen to young adult.

Even today, new players begin with their letter to Hogwarts as they commence the long journey through seven years of story content. Though, Shaw and Adams confirm that glimpses of what’s to come are scattered, including how a player’s character will look when they’re older. This offers a flavour of the latest content for newcomers without skipping the story others experienced as it unfolded.

"We know from a lot of research that part of the core fantasy of Harry Potter is getting your letter and starting at Hogwarts, getting sorted, all those initial experiences. And so we still feel like there's a lot of value in early players progressing through that," Adams asserts.

Shaw notes: "I think it was a truly unique game when it launched, it was the first game to allow players to get their letter and go to attend Hogwarts. They could really experience what it's like at Hogwarts from a daily perspective, which is something the mobile platform allows, unlike other platforms. It's really a way to engage in the wizarding world every single day.

"We have millions of players that do and as the storyline has advanced, so too have personal connections with the characters, the opportunities with the places you can go."

Adams adds: "We all know Harry's story, and we don't want to infringe on it. From the start, we really wanted it to be a player's own Hogwarts story, a way for them to make a mark on this world and feel a part of it.

"That dance - feeling authentic and mirroring some of the experiences that Harry had while also feeling like a player’s own experience - is a daily struggle with the development of the story and features."

Harry Potter’s absence from the game was "one of our biggest challenges" in the beginning, but Adams suggests that the partnership with Warner Bros. has been and continues to be a major boon.

"We have really good back and forth with that team," she says.

"Every piece of story that we write has an initial pitch and then we start outlining how it’s going to work as far as the associated gameplay. We have a back and forth about ‘Is this working? Are we stepping on toes?’ and maybe something in the outline, when we get it into a script, it’s like, ‘Let’s tweak that line a little’. It's really been a growing relationship."

Shaw suggests that a heavily vetted writing team also helps make the narrative work, comprised of people with backgrounds in film, television and "some of the best prestige video games that you can think of".

"We have a professional writing team which I think is a pretty unique thing for a mobile game maker. They run a writer's room just like you would for a TV show," he says.

"They’re kind of pitching in that room. And that's honestly like the top of the funnel for us. At the end of the day, if something doesn't come across as authentic to us, it will most certainly come across as inauthentic to the players and they will call it out. They're judging storylines."

Harry Potter and the seventh anniversary

In the runup to seven years of Hogwarts Mystery, Jam City held a weeklong campaign tying social media engagement with in-game exploration. Over seven days, seven items were hidden around Hogwarts for players to find, with clues on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.

Players who found all seven hidden items also received a mystery bonus reward.

"We tried to kind of play up seven a lot this year," says Adams.

Then, on April 25th came the anniversary itself. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery celebrating an age few mobile games reach.

While a huge 83% of mobile games fail to survive for three years, in recent years Hogwarts Mystery’s success has forced Jam City to consider the opposite - what happens after the narrative spans seven in-game years?

After all, Harry Potter’s story spans seven books, and in the canon, students graduate after their seventh year at Hogwarts; in the end, players have to graduate too.

The solution? Beyond Hogwarts.

"A couple of years ago, we launched our Beyond Hogwarts experience which was a massive undertaking but also allowed us to take the story to a place where players didn’t know where they were going. We were excited to show them new boundaries for the wizarding world," says Shaw.

While Beyond Hogwarts isn’t a brand-new addition this anniversary - it launched in 2023 - the feature has been an important focal point for Jam City in the approach to seven years. Chapter 18 of Beyond Hogwarts Volume Two is being added on April 30th for graduated players, and since this is a celebratory period, "student players" who are further behind in the story can also preview some of what's to come.

Shaw explains that "seven is a really important number in the wizarding world" and for this reason, while seven years isn’t typically a major milestone for a game, "we're trying to go as big as possible with the marketing campaign".

"They get to experience some of that adult storyline, and since that happens in parallel to things that are happening in Harry's timeline, there are opportunities for canonical intersections," Shaw notes.

Other seventh anniversary-adjacent activities planned include Harry Potter Day on May 2nd, multiple new Special Adventures and "something special" for Mother’s Day.

Harry Potter and the lessons of live ops

"It’s a live game, so we’re kind of firefighting all the time," says Shaw, referring to the maintenance of Hogwarts Mystery.

"There’s new events, there’s story dropping regularly. Players are engaging with the game and its challenges in ways that we can only discover so many of on our own, so we encounter problems all the time."

In fact, players have spent over 94 billion minutes in Hogwarts Mystery these past seven years, learnt over 700 million spells and received more than two trillion house points. With the game’s emphasis on personalisation, it also features many outfits, pets, items and even dorm rooms to collect, all of which play into live ops.

Shaws notes that players also engage with magical creatures, some of which were never-before-seen outside of "frankly very little reference text" until their appearance in Hogwarts Mystery.

"That also creates some pretty fun opportunities for us to kind of say what we think they are and sort of establish that for the fans going forward. So there's a lot we live op. And then on the event side of things, we think about how players can deepen their collection. How can they continue to express themselves in truly unique ways?"

Adams adds that story updates play into this too. "We’re going to have Nicolas Flamel in an upcoming story. And that could be sensitive, but we think it could be really awesome."

But live ops-related challenges can include the players themselves. Shaw highlights that some users go out of their way to try to uncover story spoilers, downloading builds early and deconstructing them. This means information can enter the public space before Jam City is ready to reveal it.

"There have been times where story has been revealed and new content has been misinterpreted," he explains.

"In some ways that works for our benefit because then the players can kind of go and experience it on their own and be like, ‘This isn't what that was’.

"When those moments come up, we have to see the information in the public space in a way that's almost like a disinformation campaign."

Harry Potter and the fantasies of fans

Concluding, Adams suggests that a successful brand-based mobile game finds its audience through a "perfect union of gameplay and IP", which she believes Hogwarts Mystery achieves well.

Having spent much of her career working on Harry Potter games, including Niantic’s now-shuttered AR title Wizards Unite, Adams suggests that Unite failed where Pokémon Go succeeded because Go "delivers that fan fantasy in a really unique way" for the Pokémon community - in a way that Wizards Unite could not.

As far as she’s concerned, Hogwarts Mystery has done something similar for Harry Potter fans, magicking up that "secret sauce".

She believes: "This game is creating something unique and new with distinctive gameplay - it's not necessarily following a match3 template, say. It just works really well for the IP and that's what makes it really successful."