Niantic has announced the sale of its gaming business to Saudi-owned mobile gaming specialists Scopely in a deal worth $3.5 billion. This brings Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now and more into Scopely’s portfolio, which also includes the likes of Monopoly Go!, Star Trek Fleet Command and Marvel Strike Force.
The deal will keep all the current developer teams together to continue working on the AR gaming hits, while Niantic is transitioning to being “a geospatial AI company”, seemingly looking to use all their experience with augmented reality technologies (including something called Gaussian splatting) for more general purposes.
Announcing the change on the Pokémon Go website, Ed Wu, head of Pokémon Go said, It’s been an incredible joy to serve hundreds of millions of Trainers in our real-world community for the past 10 years, and I truly believe the best is yet to come. Our mission remains clear: to inspire people to discover Pokémon in the real world together. With Scopely’s full commitment, experience, and resources, we’re going to make Pokémon Go the very best it can be – from incredible battles for thousands of Trainers at a time at our live events to new ways to connect to your friends and community. Most importantly, we’ll remain focused on the excitement and experience of discovering Pokémon in the real world.”
Scopely was founded in 2011 and has its headquarters in Culver City, California. it had its initial success with its series of … With Buddies games in 2012, before pushing into licensed IP for games like The Walking Dead: Road to Survive, Star Treck Fleet Command and Scrabble Go. In April 2023, Saudi PIF group Savvy Games Group bought Scopely for $4.9 billion, adding to its portfolio of owned companies and investments across the games industry.
We’ll have to wait and see what influence Scopely has on Niantic’s games, with the outgoing company often having a fractious relationship with its fanbase. After its breakout success in 2016, Niantic regularly sought to tweak and adjust how in-game items were used and available, often to the chagrin of the player base as this affected their ability to play – most notable, perhaps, was how Niantic made changes in 2020 to enable more distant playing through lockdowns, and then rolled them back at still contentious moments.
Pokémon Go was a huge success for the company, and remains the best example of its augmented reality game style, while they’ve struggled to adapt it to other IP. A Harry Potter game came and went, while Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter now haven’t hit the same heights. They’ve also created companion pieces like Campfire to add a new social avenue for playing their games, instead of seeing people resort to other platforms.
Source: Niantic, Pokémon Go
