There have been a lot of controversies stirred up by a scene in the mobile game Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, which requires the gamers to pay in-game money and wait when a magic plant is choking the child character. The developer of the game, Jam City, has given their thoughts in defense for the infamous scene in the game.
The creators design the scene to take place when your character exhausts energy. The game uses a familiar energy system for mobile games in which you decide to wait or pay to skip something. In this scene, if you choose not to pay to speed it up, you will have to wait and watch a magic plant strangle your young avatar.
Although the infamous scene set the initial reactions to Hogwarts Mystery about one year ago, the success of the game, in the long run, has not been affected badly. The game quickly reached a revenue of $100 million within less than one year.
Now, speaking to Eurogamer's sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Jam City boss Yosh Yguado compared this moment to other scary scenes in the books and films of Harry Potter, suggesting that the cliffhanger nature of the scene was similar to serialized narratives.
One point is that it is all very well. There is a big difference between waiting for the next episode of a TV show and waiting or paying to prevent your in-game version of a Hogwarts student being strangled right in front of your eyes. What do you think about the scene in particular and the game in general?