In 2016, Pokémon Go was the biggest video game on the planet, breaking software download records and sending local news into hysterics. Nine years and many less popular games later, developer Niantic Inc. is preparing to sell its games division to Saudia Arabia-owned Scopely Inc., according to a report by Bloomberg. How much does one of the most popular video games in history cost? The report claims the price tag for the division is an eye-watering $3.5 billion. Niantic has been contacted for comment.
Pokemon Go’s sale would be the latest twist in the tale of one of gaming’s most unlikely CEOs.
In 2001, John Hanke co-founded a mapping technology company called Keyhole that would later be acquired by Google and be foundational in the development of Google Earth and Google Maps. In 2010, Hanke, riding rarified success, chose to lead a team inside Google that would envision the future of augmented reality gaming.
The team launched Ingress, the first major global augmented reality game, in 2013 and within two years had amassed seven million players. But Ingress would be remembered less as a game than a proof of concept. In 2015, Hanke spun out the Google group into an independent company called Niantic. A year later the studio launched Pokémon Go in collaboration with (and significant funding from) Google, Nintendo, and The Pokemon Company.
By the end of 2016, Pokémon Go had been downloaded by more than 500 million players.
In the years following Pokémon Go’s success, Hanke spoke at numerous conferences about the bigger potential for augmented reality to connect the real world with the artificial one. He imagined ways augmented reality could place players into shared virtual worlds while they occupied a physical one, all with the support of Niantic’s tools.
In 2020, Covid-19 hit, and millions of players sheltered in place. As the pandemic became an endemic, Niantic began to cancel titles. In 2023, the company laid off 230 employees, roughly 25% of its workforce. Hanke emphasized, alongside the deep cuts, the company’s need to focus on Pokémon Go and he acknowledged that the AR market was “developing more slowly than anticipated.”
Now, it appears Hanke and what team members remain at Niantic could return to what inspired them long before video games: mapping. The data collected by all the Niantic apps has been used to create large geospatial models in an effort to achieve spatial intelligence. Last November, Niantic’s Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu published an update on the project: “At Niantic, we are pioneering the concept of a Large Geospatial Model that will use large-scale machine learning to understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.”
Because it’s 2025 and the answer is always AI.
