Niantic may sell its game development unit to Scopely for $3.5M. The move follows layoffs and canceled projects.
Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources, that Niantic, the company behind the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, is looking to sell its game development business.
The company is reportedly exploring a deal with mobile game developer Scopely, which is owned by Saudi Arabia-based Savvy Games Group, to sell the unit for about $3.5 million.
Niantic and Scopely did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Niantic is among the few companies that have successfully used its augmented reality skills to build games. Its first title, Ingress, was widely praised for its unique, geography-based take on territory control. Still, the company truly skyrocketed to fame with Pokémon Go, which took off in 2016 and quickly became a global phenomenon.
Its subsequent titles have been relatively successful, but not at the scale Pokémon Go enjoyed. In 2022, the company laid off 8% of its staff and shuttered four projects, including Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. In 2023, it laid off 230 employees and canceled its NBA and Marvel-related games.
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Last year, it updated its Scaniverse app to let users create models of real-world objects and provide the data to developers. In November, the company wanted to build a large geospatial model using machine learning to “understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.”
