Was LEGO Harry Potter too much for the Mac App Store?

If you find yourself looking for Lego Harry Potter this morning on the Mac App Store, and you’re starting to wonder if you’re crazy because you saw it earlier, don’t make that call to a mental health professional: Lego Harry Potter was removed from the store by Apple.

We mentioned in an earlier post that Feral Interactive had the game published to the Mac App Store at launch, but that it has since gone missing. According to Feral Interactive, it appears that the games file size may be to blame. Traditionally, iOS and most Mac App Store applications are quite small (20MB through to about 100MB), but LEGO Harry Potter weighs in at just under seven gigabytes in size. When you combine the files size with the enormous press surrounding the Mac App Store opening yesterday, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of data was being shipped around.  Feral Interactive thinks that the combination of the large file size and Apple’s download mechanism was resulting in the corruption of files being shipped to consumers.  By the time the game was downloaded and ready to play, it was rendered unusable, so Apple pulled it until they could figure out what’s going on.

The game wasn’t pulled for any nefarious reason, nor was it a cash grab like some seem to be suggesting on Apple’s discussion board, instead it’s a small kink that’s being worked on by both Feral Interactive and Apple. Both companies hope that the game will find its way back onto the Mac App Store later today.

Maybe it’s time Apple turns on that giant data centre in North Carolina.

The Feral Interactive team is currently looking for someone to run some tests on the files that were successfully downloaded from the Mac App Store yesterday. So, if you’re familiar with the Terminal, and don’t mind helping them out, you can contact them at support@feralinteractive.com.  They will be in touch with proper instructions.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.