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 standard video games later, developer Niantic Inc. is making ready to promote its video games division to Saudia Arabia-owned Scopely Inc., in line with a report by Bloomberg. How a lot does probably the most standard video video games in historical past value? The report claims the worth 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 among gaming’s very unlikely CEOs.
In 2001, John Hanke co-founded a mapping know-how firm referred to as Keyhole that might later be acquired by Google and be foundational within the improvement of Google Earth and Google Maps. In 2010, Hanke, using rarified success, selected to steer a group inside Google that might envision the way forward for augmented actuality gaming.
The group launched Ingress, the primary main world augmented actuality recreation, in 2013 and inside two years had amassed seven million gamers. However Ingress could be remembered much less as a recreation than a proof of idea. In 2015, Hanke spun out the Google group into an impartial firm referred to as Niantic. A yr 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 larger potential for augmented actuality to attach the true world with the substitute one. He imagined methods augmented actuality may place gamers into shared digital worlds whereas they occupied a bodily one, all with the help of Niantic’s instruments.
In 2020, Covid-19 hit, and hundreds of thousands of gamers sheltered in place. Because the pandemic turned 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 give attention to Pokémon Go and he acknowledged that the AR market was “growing extra slowly than anticipated.”
Now, it seems Hanke and what group members stay at Niantic may return to what impressed them lengthy earlier than video video games: mapping. The info collected by all of the Niantic apps has been used to create massive geospatial fashions in an effort to realize spatial intelligence. Final November, Niantic’s Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu revealed an replace on the mission: “At Niantic, we’re pioneering the idea of a Massive Geospatial Mannequin that may use large-scale machine studying to grasp a scene and join it to hundreds of thousands of different scenes globally.”
As a result of it’s 2025 and the reply is at all times AI.