In 2016, Pokémon Go was the largest online game on the planet, breaking software program obtain data and sending native information into hysterics. 9 years and plenty of much less common video games later, developer Niantic Inc. is making ready to promote its video games division to Saudia Arabia-owned Scopely Inc., in keeping with a report by Bloomberg. How a lot does probably the most common video video games in historical past value? The report claims the value tag for the division is an eye-watering $3.5 billion. Niantic has been contacted for remark.
Pokemon Go’s sale could be the newest twist within the story of one in every of gaming’s very unlikely CEOs.
In 2001, John Hanke co-founded a mapping know-how firm referred to as Keyhole that may later be acquired by Google and be foundational within the improvement of Google Earth and Google Maps. In 2010, Hanke, driving rarified success, selected to guide a workforce inside Google that may envision the way forward for augmented actuality gaming.
The workforce launched Ingress, the primary main international augmented actuality sport, in 2013 and inside two years had amassed seven million gamers. However Ingress could be remembered much less as a sport than a proof of idea. In 2015, Hanke spun out the Google group into an unbiased firm referred to as Niantic. A 12 months later the studio launched Pokémon Go in collaboration with (and important funding from) Google, Nintendo, and The Pokemon Firm.
By the tip of 2016, Pokémon Go had been downloaded by greater than 500 million gamers.
Within the years following Pokémon Go’s success, Hanke spoke at quite a few conferences concerning the greater potential for augmented actuality to attach the actual world with the synthetic one. He imagined methods augmented actuality may place gamers into shared digital worlds whereas they occupied a bodily one, all with the assist of Niantic’s instruments.
In 2020, Covid-19 hit, and tens of millions of gamers sheltered in place. Because the pandemic grew to become an endemic, Niantic started to cancel titles. In 2023, the corporate laid off 230 staff, roughly 25% of its workforce. Hanke emphasised, alongside the deep cuts, the corporate’s have to deal with Pokémon Go and he acknowledged that the AR market was “growing extra slowly than anticipated.”
Now, it seems Hanke and what workforce members stay at Niantic may return to what impressed them lengthy earlier than video video games: mapping. The information collected by all of the Niantic apps has been used to create giant geospatial fashions in an effort to realize spatial intelligence. Final November, Niantic’s Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu revealed an replace on the undertaking: “At Niantic, we’re pioneering the idea of a Massive Geospatial Mannequin that may use large-scale machine studying to know a scene and join it to tens of millions of different scenes globally.”
As a result of it’s 2025 and the reply is at all times AI.
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