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.

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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.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • VRDeveloper

    Imagine a pokemon in AR with Meta Quest, that would be absolute gameplay, imagine now the world around you being changed by the game, and the real-time combat, apart from the fact that it would be very cringe to see people doing this on the street, it would be amazing.

  • I understand the will to focus, but the new business is not guaranteed to bring revenues, while Pokemon Go is a big cash cow…

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Losing their most successful product certainly is a risk, but revenue generated by Pokemon Go has been steadily falling since 2020. It still makes more than USD 500mn each year, though a significant part of that will go to Nintendo for the license. So a USD 3.5bn offer might be worth 10+ years of running it for Niantic, esp. considering the falling engagement and their failure to replicate its success with other, similar titles.

      The focus on geo data services in no way guarantees a success either, but is more along the lines of what we see as trends in XR, with Meta leaning towards smart glasses that provide location based services or Google emphasizing their Maps etc. integration with Gemini during the first AndroidXR hands-on. Apple for now positions AVP as an indoor, stationary XR HMD, focused on productivity use and media. But AVP was the first to allow moving around and using larger spaces by ommiting a guardian and letting users place windows in separate rooms, with a way to access them without having to move back there. AVP also saw some really impressive mixed media uses with the MR top down F1 track showing car position based on live telemetry, and recently something similar for soccer. We know they made a 10 year, USD 2bn deal with a soccer league that includes developing new types of media, so they are heading for XR use incorporating live real world location data too, only coming from a different direction.

      So it seems pretty sure that the services Niantic is now working on will see more demand in the future, while Pokemon Go was mostly a one time hit thanks to a perfect storm of smartphones with geo-location capable of simple AR features becoming ubiquitous, a very prominent IP with mechanics that asked to catch something that first needed discovering in real space, and then breeding by moving through said space, peaking during the pandemic when being outside without direct contact was the safest option. Nobody ever managed to come up with a location based game anywhere as popular as Pokemon Go, not even Niantec, so taking the money and run towards something that will bring in less money in the short term, but probably be more sustainable in the long run, might be a good idea.

      • VR HO

        One Trick Pony