Back in 2016, Pokémon Go was the game that everyone seemed to be playing, shattering download records and turning local news stations into boiling pots of frenzy. Fast forward nine years and several less successful titles, and Niantic Inc., the studio behind this colossal hit, is reportedly poised to sell off its gaming division. According to Bloomberg, the buyer is none other than Scopely Inc., now owned by Saudi Arabia, with the deal estimated at a staggering $3.5 billion. Niantic has yet to comment on this report.
The potential sale of Pokémon Go is just another chapter in the story of one of the industry’s most surprising leaders.
Let’s rewind to 2001 when John Hanke co-founded Keyhole, a company specializing in mapping technology. This venture caught Google’s eye, leading to its acquisition and playing a crucial role in the creation of Google Earth and Maps. Riding the wave of his success, Hanke decided in 2010 to head a Google team focused on dreaming up the future of augmented reality gaming.
In 2013, this team launched Ingress, the first major global augmented reality game, quickly garnering around seven million players. However, Ingress was less about the game and more about demonstrating what was possible. By 2015, Hanke had spun off this Google group into Niantic, a standalone company. A year later, they unveiled Pokémon Go, a joint effort backed by Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company.
By the close of 2016, Pokémon Go had reached over 500 million downloads.
Riding on the wave of Pokémon Go’s enormous success, Hanke became a regular face at conferences, where he discussed the broader potential of augmented reality as a means to meld the physical and digital worlds. He envisioned a future where augmented reality could allow players to step into shared virtual worlds, seamlessly anchored by Niantic’s technology.
Then in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, forcing millions to stay at home. As the world transitioned from pandemic to endemic, Niantic found itself cutting back. By 2023, the company had laid off 230 employees, nearly a quarter of its workforce. Alongside these tough decisions, Hanke stressed the urgency to hone in on Pokémon Go, acknowledging that the augmented reality market was “developing more slowly than anticipated.”
Now, it seems Hanke and what remains of the Niantic team might be circling back to their original passion—mapping. The vast amount of data gathered through Niantic’s apps has been leveraged to create extensive geospatial models, pushing the envelope for spatial intelligence. Last November, two of Niantic’s key figures, Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu, shared an update on this endeavor: “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.”
And because it’s 2025, the answer, as always, comes down to AI.
