In 2016, Pokémon Go was the largest online game on the planet, breaking software program obtain information and sending native information into hysterics. 9 years and plenty of much less well-liked video games later, developer Niantic Inc. is making ready to promote its video games division to Saudia Arabia-owned Scopely Inc., in response to a report by Bloomberg. How a lot does one of the vital well-liked video video games in historical past price? 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 can be the most recent twist within the story of one in every of gaming’s impossible CEOs.
In 2001, John Hanke co-founded a mapping know-how firm known as Keyhole that may later be acquired by Google and be foundational within the growth of Google Earth and Google Maps. In 2010, Hanke, using rarified success, selected to guide a crew inside Google that may envision the way forward for augmented actuality gaming.
The crew launched Ingress, the primary main world augmented actuality sport, in 2013 and inside two years had amassed seven million gamers. However Ingress can be remembered much less as a sport than a proof of idea. In 2015, Hanke spun out the Google group into an unbiased firm known 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 top 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 actual world with the unreal 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 thousands and thousands 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 workers, roughly 25% of its workforce. Hanke emphasised, alongside the deep cuts, the corporate’s have to concentrate on Pokémon Go and he acknowledged that the AR market was “creating extra slowly than anticipated.”
Now, it seems Hanke and what crew 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 printed an replace on the challenge: “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 thousands and thousands of different scenes globally.”
As a result of it’s 2025 and the reply is all the time AI.
