A lead designer working on Warner Brothers' Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy video game operated a YouTube channel where he ranted about "identity politics" and supported Gamergate, the harassment campaign against women in the game industry.
Among Leavitt's other videos are lengthy defenses of both John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder who left his position at Disney in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct, and Nolan Bushnell, the Atari co-founder who Kotaku's reporting found to have fostered a toxic work environment for women. In some of his videos, Leavitt expressed support for Gamergate, a movement that fostered harassment against women and other minorities in the gaming industry, and criticized Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women series as an "uninformed fringe position." Leavitt discussed his opinions on Gamergate in-depth during a 2017 interview, saying, "Gamergate, while painful at times, on the whole proved to be a good thing,"
That it's the big new Harry Potter game gives a false impression, I think, that this all has something in particular to do with the franchise, with J.K. Rowling's anti-trans turn, with WB's cowardly effort to throw her under the bus, and so on. Ironies abound, and the jokes write themselves.
But it's really just a coincidence that it's a Potter project. There are people like this everywhere in the software trade. Being that guy is good on your resume, not a hindrance, if you want to get ahead in games. He's just naive to have left it all online after doing so, falling into PR cracks opened by his employer's disinterested hypocrisy.
