The publisher, which hasn’t had such a positive reputation lately, has previously shot down the chances of the wizard kid doing something unique.

Kim Salzer used to work at Electronic Arts. Looking at her LinkedIn, you’ll see that she was the product marketing director at Electronic Arts from 2000 to 2003 (and then vice president of international brand management at Activision from 2004 to 2009). She, therefore, had a good insight into the publisher’s past experiments. She revealed one of them in an interview on Twitch.

The company founded by Trip Hawkins planned an MMO based on the Harry Potter franchise. Let’s hear what Salzer had to say: “We did all the research. We had the beta built out. It was a combination offline and online experience where we’d mail stuff to the kids, like prizes and ribbons and things like that. [It was] thoroughly researched, very confident in its success.

But it was killed, for lack of a better term, because Electronic Arts was going through some changes at that time, and they just didn’t know or believe enough that the IP would have a shelf-life longer than a year or two,” Salzer said. At the time, Harry Potter was mainly aimed at children: the darker tone episodes were far from the cinemas and the bookshelves. (Part 7, which got two cinematic and video game adaptations, the latter of which were shoddy and published by EA, fits the bill.) In other words: the publisher didn’t believe in the long-term success of its games (even though the Need For Speed titles of the early 2000s still hold up today…).

But it’s worth pointing out that we mentioned an MMO. If you go with 2003, even that could have beaten Blizzard’s attempt that is still running today (without commentary: World of Warcraft), so Electronic Arts missed a massive opportunity, as the game model would have allowed for content updates based on later movies so that it could have been up and running by 2011 when the second movie part of the seventh book was released…

Source: PCGamer