Back in 2016, Pokémon Go took the world by storm. This game shattered download records and became a constant topic on local news. Fast forward nine years and numerous less memorable games later, Niantic Inc., the developer behind Pokémon Go, looks poised to sell its gaming division. The potential buyer? Scopely Inc., a company owned by Saudi Arabia. As reported by Bloomberg, this deal could come with a staggering $3.5 billion price tag. Reaching out to Niantic for their comments has yielded no response yet.
If this deal goes through, it would add another interesting chapter to the story of Niantic’s unexpected CEO. John Hanke, co-founder of a mapping technology company called Keyhole, played a pivotal role in the creation of Google Earth and Google Maps after the company was acquired by Google in 2001. By 2010, Hanke was leading a team at Google that was exploring the future of augmented reality gaming.
This team made their first major move with the launch of Ingress in 2013, a global augmented reality game that attracted seven million players in just two years. Though Ingress wasn’t just seen as a game, it was a proof of concept for bigger things. In 2015, Hanke took the step to establish Niantic as an independent company, parting ways with Google. The following year, they rolled out Pokémon Go, backed by funding from Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company.
By the conclusion of 2016, Pokémon Go had been downloaded by over half a billion players worldwide.
In the wake of Pokémon Go’s monumental success, Hanke frequently gave talks discussing augmented reality as a tool to blend the real with the digital world, envisioning a future where players could be physically present while being part of these shared virtual experiences, all empowered by Niantic’s technology.
Then came 2020, when the pandemic forced millions indoors. As COVID-19 persisted, Niantic found itself canceling various projects. By 2023, they had laid off about 230 employees, which was roughly a quarter of their workforce. Despite these challenges, Hanke expressed the importance of refocusing on Pokémon Go and admitted that the augmented reality market wasn’t growing as fast as they had hoped.
Now, it seems Niantic, under Hanke’s leadership, might be reconnecting with their roots in mapping. The data gathered from Niantic’s apps has contributed to creating massive geospatial models in their pursuit of spatial intelligence. Last November, Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu from Niantic shared an update: “At Niantic, we’re leading the way with a Large Geospatial Model, leveraging large-scale machine learning to interpret a scene and link it to millions of scenes worldwide.”
Because, as we look to the future in 2025, the answer inevitably seems to circle back to AI.
