Harry Potter - Softonic English

With the release of the first two movies in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise and three more to come, the Harry Potter universe has had a resurgence in popularity. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a screenplay about the famous trio Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger, takes place 19 years after the last Harry Potter book’s events and gives fans a little taste of the story that came first. Although the Harry Potter YouTube fanbase is small compared to other genres like gaming or makeup, these top 8 YouTubers have strong opinions and an incredible amount of creativity that helps them stand out among the rest.

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8 best YouTube channels for Harry Potter fans

1. Cherry Wallis

Hogwarts House: Gryffindor
Subscriber count as of today: 431,902

When you think of Harry Potter on YouTube, chances are you’re thinking of Cherry Wallis. Before throwing herself completely into Harry Potter, Cherry’s channel consisted mainly of beauty product reviews, makeup and cosplay tutorials, and skits. Now you can find wand reviews, Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts monthly subscription box unboxings, magical DIYs, and our personal favorite – the vlog where she met J.K. Rowling herself. Cherry truly has everything a Harry Potter fan is looking for in a YouTube channel.

2. TheBakeey

Hogwarts House: Slytherin
Subscriber count as of today: 168,593

TheBakeey (Sophie Baker) is known for being the proudest Slytherin around, and for her obsession with the Potions professor Severus Snape. Her channel has subscription box unboxings, merchandise hauls, and our favorite, fanmail unboxings – TheBakeey’s fans really go all out. We haven’t seen anyone with a Funko Pop! collection like hers. Like a few other YouTubers on this list, last year Sophie was invited to walk the blue carpet at the “Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald” premiere in the UK.

3. The Potter Collector

Hogwarts House: Slytherin
Subscriber count as of today: 72,305

The Potter Collector (Peter Kenneth) is the first on our list of YouTubers not from the UK. Based in Illinois, Peter has one of the largest collection of Harry Potter books around. With the count currently over 1,100 books of all languages, Peter makes videos reviewing the new versions he comes across as well as the rare books he gets, like his copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. This book is a replica of the seven that were handwritten and hand bound by J.K. Rowling. One of the original seven was purchased by Amazon for around 4 million dollars, and 100 signed replicas were made. Peter claims that his replica is the rarest book that he has in his collection at the moment.

Other videos in The Potter Collector channel are tips for book collectors who are just starting, like how to know if a book is authentic, the difference between an edition and a printing, and how to know what your books are worth. These videos are packed with valuable information that collectors and fans will enjoy.

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4. Seamus Gorman

Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff
Subscriber count as of today: 306,205

Seamus Gorman is one of the few Harry Potter YouTubers who have non-Potter content on their channel, as Seamus is also a Pixar fan. With that said, he is most known for his Harry Potter theories. One of his most popular videos is when he broke down and intensely analyzed the trailer for the “Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald” film trailer, with the video raking in over 96,000 views. He has a knack for tying in little-known facts that even the most thorough fan might have missed.

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5. Vegard

Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff
Subscriber count as of today: 90,774

Like a lot of the other YouTubers, Vegard Saeterhaug does merchandise and subscription box reviews, but most of his videos are challenges, vlogs, and quizzes. We really enjoyed his recent video which was a discussion on whether or not Harry Potter is becoming oversaturated, with J.K. Rowling having a tendency to reveal important facts about characters and the wizarding world retroactively. This is one of the most controversial topics among fans now, and Vegard is pretty awesome for addressing it.

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6. Harry Potter Folklore

Hogwarts House: Slytherin
Subscriber count as of today: 335,302

Harry Potter Folklore is a channel that focuses mainly on – you guessed it – Harry Potter Folklore created by Dean Jewell. The channel explores character profiles and family bloodlines, theories about prophecies and magical artifacts. Each video dives deeply into each topic backed up thoroughly by facts and cites a number of resources including the Harry Potter books, interviews with J.K. Rowling, and more. From time to time, Dean also has videos of himself taking some of the most popular quizzes on Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s website created to be a hub for information on the wizarding world.

7. KivoxEnder

Subscriber count as of today: 25,993

KivoxEnder (Alfredo Fonseca) is dedicated to merchandise reviews. While there is the occasional video on merchandise from other fandoms, Alfredo focuses collecting all of the authentic wand replicas from the Harry Potter universe, and creating some of his own. While most Harry Potter YouTubers review top subscription box sellers like Loot Crate and Geek Gear, the KivoxEnder channel likes to give lesser known boxes a little exposure.

8. Tessa Netting

Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw
Subscriber count as of today: 542,032

Tessa Netting is not only a Harry Potter YouTuber, but an actress and singer. Some of her Harry Potter videos are mashups or parodies of popular radio or broadway hits with Harry Potter related lyrics. Tessa’s channel is absolutely packed with quizzes, merchandise hauls, and tours of Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter. We loved seeing her interview with none other than the star of the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise, Eddie Redmayne, whose plays Newt Scamander in the films. All of her content, even the videos that may seem commonplace like a morning routine, have a magical touch.

All of these creative individuals bring something fun and unique to the Harry Potter fandom, and if you’re not already subscribed, you’re missing out. Which of these YouTubers is your favorite?

Why movie-based video games disappeared

Games are extremely expensive to make today

Bungie’s Destiny cost $140 million to make

Movie games first really started dropping off during the PS3/Xbox 360 era. Why? Because as technology became more advanced and consoles were finally able to display realistic and detailed HD graphics, gamers had a higher standard for games in general. Even slapping together the cheapest movie game would be an expensive move for any gaming studio, who already had to shell out in order to get the movie license in the first place. While movie games tended to sell pretty consistently due to the popularity of their licenses, they never really cracked the top 5 yearly best-selling games list. As such, they became too much of a financial risk to develop.

It should also be mentioned that publishers demanded that developers finish and ship the game in time for the movie’s release, leading to an impossibly rushed schedule that made it extremely difficult for developers to make a quality, technically impressive game. Back in the NES days, developers could slap together a cheap and generic 2D platformer based on an upcoming movie and call it a day. Both the production costs and the consumer’s expectations were much lower. As gamers were exposed to more and more triple-A technical marvels, their demand for cheap movie games sharply decreased.

The games typically sucked

E.T. the Extraterrestrial for Atari 2600, based on the classic movie and widely considered to be the worst game of all time

Video games and movies mix together like peanut butter and petroleum jelly. Movies based on video games almost always suck, and video games based on movies almost always suck. Movie games were notorious for years for being rushed, cheap, and uninspired slap jobs. It’s easy to see how most of them turned out that way. The development cycles of the game were incredibly rushed due to publishers forcing developers to finish the game by the movie’s release. The games are both designed to be made as cheaply as possible and to appeal to the widest possible audience, ensuring no risks or creativity in game design. This results in generic forgettable platformers at best and broken messes at worst.

Take the case of the “E.T.” game for the Atari 2600, a game so legendarily bad, most of the cartridges ended up in a landfill. We even have a documentary about how awful it was.

Fortunately, there are some movie games that break this curse. Spider-Man 2 lets players explore New York as the wall-crawler, with an intuitive physics-based web-swinging system. The Lion King on the SNES is a tightly controlled platformer with beautiful graphics and music. And of course, Goldeneye 007 is one of the most iconic shooters in history, paving the road for console multiplayer shooters and expansive, varied single-player campaigns. It’s unfortunate how few good movie games there were, as many of the licenses they’re based on could make really fun games if the developers were given freedom.

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Mobile games suit movie tie-ins way better

It’s safe to assume that this Frozen mobile puzzle game makes a billion dollars every five minutes

The explosion of the mobile gaming industry handed the solution to movie game publishers on a silver platter. Making movie tie-in games on mobile instead of consoles solved all of the problems listed above.

1. The standards for games on mobile devices is way, way lower than those on a console. Impressive graphics and high production values are not expected at all for mobile games. Most mobile gamers are just looking for a quick, mindless distraction on their commute, and mobile game developers can use this mindset to create smaller, simpler games. Additionally, developers don’t need to come up with creative game design, they just need to re-skin a popular idea, like a puzzle or endless runner game, with whatever property they’re working with.

2. Mobile games are significantly less expensive to develop than console games. Just take a simple, tried-and-true concept like a puzzle game and slap a popular franchise on it and you’re gold. Additionally, mobile games bring in an astronomical amount of money through in-game purchases. Most mobile games are free, meaning the barrier to entry is non-existent. Gamers are more incentivized to spend small chunks of money on mobile games, which are typically designed as virtual Skinner boxes that heavily promote in-app purchases. The extremely low costs of development combined with the huge profitability of in-app purchases make mobile games based on hit properties a gold mine.

Do you miss movie games? What are your favorite movie games, or your least favorite ones? Let us know in the comments below!

Tag: Harry Potter

Top 8 Harry Potter YouTubers