Not quite a month ago, we got wind of rumors that Niantic was negotiating a sale of its games division – including Pokemon Go – to Scopely, a US-based studio that is part of Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group. Those rumors have now been proven accurate.
“Pokémon GO will be joining Scopely, a video-game developer and publisher home to a wide range of leading games and talented teams around the world,” Pokemon Go boss Ed Wu announced this morning. He calls the partnership a “positive step for all of you and the game’s future” for three reasons: He thinks Scopely admires the team and community and “full believes in [the] mission” for POGO and will continue providing resources for it; he says the “entire” POGO team is staying together to work on the game under Scopely and existing Scopely devs have given him confidence that Scopely will support the team; and he says POGO will thrive under a private company dedicated specifically to games (left unspoken is that Niantic really wasn’t ever that).
“I won’t say that Pokémon GO will remain the same, because it has always been a work in progress,” Wu concludes. “But how we create and evolve it will remain unchanged, and I hope that we can make the experience even better for all of you.”
The Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom teams have posted much briefer messages with less detail and no names, but both imply the games will continue to be supported by Scopely.
Niantic boss John Hanke has a memo as well, saying Niantic is charting a “bold new course” focusing on what Niantic has always cared about: augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and geospatial technology. The $3.85B deal includes Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, and “the incredible teams working on these experiences”; Niantic is also moving its geospatial AI to a new Niantic sub-company led by Hanke himself.
Longtime MOP readers will know that MOP’s Andrew has covered Pokemon Go and Niantic in exhaustive detail since POGO’s launch in 2016. While POGO was initially a global success and made stacks of money, it struggled in recent years with buggy content, mismanaged events, security lapses, and bizarre comms, leading us to suggest that POGO was merely the pretty face on Niantic’s data-harvesting and AI business. And I’m not sure we were wrong.
