Niantic is finally leaving Pokémon Go behind.
In an update on their website, the company has revealed that they are selling off Pokémon Go, alongside Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom, to Scopely, a mobile game publisher acquired by the Saudi government’s Savvy Games.
This revolves around something Niantic introduced in Pokémon Go last year. In November the company revealed they were working on large geospatial models, a technology similar to OpenAI’s Chat-GPT. If Chat-GPT is a large language model fed on large amounts of textual data, Niantic’s geospatial model was trained on map data from sources like Google Street View/Google Earth and OpenStreetMap.
This technology had a benign application in Pokémon Go. Using the Pokémon Playgrounds feature, players can place a Pokémon in a specific real time location, and other players can come along to find the Pokémon there. Niantic says they will keep working on their geospatial AI further, and that seems to be the reason for this sale. Niantic is still publishing their original mobile AR games, Ingress and Peridot, and they may be using those games to continue their geospatial AI experiments.
For their party, Scopely revealed that their acquisition, valued at $ 3.5 billion, will include all the dev teams already working on Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom. The teams will now be led by Kei Kawai and Ed Wu, who are already in charge of these games as well. So at least hypothetically, there should be no change to the game’s development as well.
We should also note that this deal will still be subject to regulatory approval. As we have seen in the case of the Microsoft – Activision deal, that process is not necessarily a routine procedure. But Scopely has had success in their own right with games like Monopoly Go and Stumble Guys, so it’s not just that they’re going in thinking they’ll make easy money.
In fact, Scopely may turn out to find ways to bring back Pokémon Go’s business, in ways that also excite their fans again. Subsequently, Monster Hunter Now is still growing, but we haven’t seen to what extent it will be successful. Pikmin Bloom, on the other hand, is characteristic of Niantic’s limited success in replicating Pokémon Go’s success.
This is a new chapter for AR games, and it will now be on Scopely to decide if the genre enters a renaissance, settles into a niche, or simply fades away as a very successful but temporary fad.
