Totally agree with you there, that Harry Potter fans can be intense. I've read so many articles on how they stalk the actors and hated on the girl who played Hermione because she got to spend time with the boys in the movie. WTF.

Anyway, back to the game... I am so constantly disappointed by licensed games that I have almost zero interest in this game. The sad thing is, I quite enjoyed the series and read the whole thing. So I'm the target audience (fan of the books & movies, have a job so I can afford to get games when I want), but they have made me so jaded about the games that are linked to the series that I am not even thinking about getting it. It seems like there is something wrong with this picture.

The thing is that you aren't in the "real" target audience for these games. Licensing games have limited time and have very severe resource restrictions so there is only so much you can do. So, in the case of a series like Harry Potter that has a really broad appeal, you have to go for the largest target demographic, which in this case, is much younger (and therefore much less sophisticated in their tastes).

Oh crap. I think I just implied that ebeast had sophisticated tastes. :D

Even though you disagreed with me, I shall grant you a Power Up for acknowledging my superior tastes. Now, you are excused. Leave us! *channeling too much Tudor royalty from having watched The Other Boleyn Girl recently*

I just like making up HP names, like HP Smokes from the Goblet of Fire

I think most games attached to brand movies generally suck as they need to spend so much of their game production budget on getting the movie rights. i.e. the Borne Ultimatum game sucked ass.

In some cases, it is due to money getting tied up by the license (but it could be argued that the money spent there is countered by the increased sales you get from the license). But the biggest issue is schedule. You have a hard fixed deadline that you have to hit, but you are almost completely dependent on the movie studio for assets to build your game with.

For example, take a game based on the Transformers movie. You wouldn't be able to model anything until you had the final movie designs. You could make rough models, but you would constantly be changing them and adjusting them as the movie models take shape - something that can end up affecting gameplay. Or you might not get the final script until 6 months before the game is due to release. All sorts of things go wrong...