Hogwarts Legacy delayed into 2023, but with a firm release date

High-profile Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy has been delayed to a new release date of February 10th, 2023. That’s for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, with a Switch release on a launch date to “be revealed soon.” It’s the second time the open-world action RPG set in the 1800s of the Harry Potter Wizarding World has been delayed, first from 2021 into 2022, then pinned for a holiday 2022 release, and now a delay into the first quarter of 2023.

“The team is excited for you to play, but we need a little more time to deliver the best possible game experience,” said an announcement posted to the Hogwarts Legacy Twitter.  A second statement, delivered by Avalanche Software community manager Chandler Wood, was also posted to Twitter. “You may be disappointed that the game’s been pushed out of 2022,” said Wood, “but we’re excited to finally give you a release date you can look forward to.”

We’ve kept up with Hogwarts Legacy’s development from its earliest days as a skeptically-eyed leak through to announcement in 2019. You can find more about Hogwarts Legacy on its official website, but we’ve also compiled everything we know about Hogwarts Legacy if you don’t want to fish around the net for details. (Which is weird, I guess, since you usually use a net for the entire act of fishing.)

Hogwarts Legacy has had a long, eventful development history. Publicly, that kicked off in 2018, when leaked video implied a game called Harry Potter Magic Awakened was in development at WB’s Avalanche studio. Things actually got wild a few years later Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling added her own complexity to the mix with some quite outspoken transphobic views in 2020—and apparently the developers of Hogwarts Legacy fought to include a trans-inclusive character creator in the RPG. The studio also contended with a PR battle around a producer who had a history of posting anti-social justice videos to YouTube. That producer later resigned.