spatialcomputing.info

Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go (2016), is reportedly in talks with Saudi Arabia-owned Scopely to sell its gaming division.

According to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the talks, the report maintains the companies are currently discussing a $3.5 billion acquisition price, which could conclude in the coming weeks.

This would include the transfer of Pokémon Go in addition to Niantic’s other mobile games, such as Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom.

Niantic is also known for Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which attempted to replicate the success of Pokémon Go, but critically failed, forcing the company to shut down development in 2022.

Provided the sale goes through, this would leave the San Francisco-based Niantic to focus on its growing list of AR development platforms and geo-spatial mapping tools.

In May 2022, Niantic launched its Lightship Visual Positioning System, which forms an underlying 3D map of the world so AR devices can share the same frame of reference, even on massive scales.

Then, later that year, the company announced it was working with Qualcomm on a reference AR headset based on the Snapdragon AR2 platform, which at the time the company called an “outdoor AR headset.”

While Niantic hasn’t released any hardware as such, last September the company announced it was entering in a partnership with Snap to bring its AR pet simulator game Peridot to Snap’s fifth generation of Spectacles.

Then, a few months later, the company released its VPS-integrated WebXR app Into The Scaniverse, which was built using Niantic Studio to let users capture real-world locations in 3D and view on Meta Quest.

Without its gaming properties, we’d expect Niantic to essentially be all-in on AR, as the company would ostensibly look to leverage VPS, Niantic Studio and Niantic Spatial Platform SDK.