Pokemon Go has had an exceptionally wide reach over the last few years. Since launching in 2016, it has become one of the most successful mobile games on Android and iOS with a cult following to this day. The team at Pokemon Go has announced that a new owner will be buying the rights to the game, though they suggest the current dev team will remain unchanged.
Pokemon Go has been a property of Niantic since the 2016 launch. Prior to that, Niantic was started by Google’s John Hanke as an in-house startup and had broken off as an independent company with Alphabet’s backing right before Pokemon Go launched with Nintendo’s IP. The game has since become a huge title in the Play Store, though the initial surge of players it saw in the early years has somewhat dwindled. The title is still incredibly popular, which has spurred a change in ownership.
According to the Pokemon Go team, Niantic’s games business has been sold to Scopely for $3.5 billion, the owners of familiar mobile games like Marvel Strike Force and Star Trek Fleet Command. Ed Wu notes that the current developer team will stick with Pokemon Go, and events will continue to occur, if not expand. The partnerships in place with The Pokemon company will also continue because without it, the game could not exist.
The move to Scopely likely indicates a need for Pokemon Go to make more money via monetization. Something many of Sceoply’s games on Android and iOS have in common is ads or other forms of monetization. The new parent company will want to see profit from Pokemon Go, and that might mean we see more ads and a bigger push for consumable items via microtransactions.
Niantic isn’t done, though. John Hanke is spinning the company off into Niantic Spatial which will be a “geospatial AI company,” because why not? The company found it’s roots in creating an AR game that merged with real life, and the company is continuing to work on that mission through other AI games like Ingress Prime and Peridot.
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