Only a month in the past, we discovered that Niantic had secured a deal to promote its video games division to Scopely, a US-based studio that’s a part of Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Video games Group. That deal included Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now, and all of the of their groups, for a whopping $3.85B US. On the time, Pokemon Go boss Ed Wu instructed followers that Scopely had picked up all the POGO workforce, which led even our extraordinarily skeptical Massively on the Go columnist Andrew to have some hope for the sport’s future.
Effectively, I can’t consider I’m saying this, however it’s beginning to seem like the sport devs who moved from Niantic to Scopely really acquired the higher finish of the deal by type of so much. That’s as a result of Niantic has simply laid off one other 68 staffers who apparently didn’t get to make that transfer and have now been deemed pointless detritus. The information grew to become public due to a layoff discover revealed by Niantic as mandated by the California WARN Act.
Final month, Niantic’s John Hanke adopted up the sale announcement by declaring that Niantic could be charting a “daring new course” with a deal with augmented actuality, synthetic intelligence, and geospatial know-how. As we famous on the time, now we have lengthy suspected that POGO was merely the socially acceptable entrance for Niantic’s precise data-harvesting and AI enterprise, and that transfer solely added to the proof.
This newest spherical of layoffs will, in line with Hanke, permit the corporate to run as a “startup” the place “some roles wouldn’t be required giving [Niantic’s] new focus.” You realize, a startup that simply bought its whole video games division for nearly $4B.
