In 2016, Pokémon Go was the biggest video game on the planet, breaking software download records and sending local news into hysterics. Nine years and many less popular games later, developer Niantic Inc. is preparing to sell its games division to Saudia Arabia-owned Scopely Inc., according to a report by Bloomberg. How much does one of the most popular video games in history cost? The report claims the price tag for the division is an eye-watering $3.5 billion. Niantic has been contacted for comment.
Pokemon Go’s sale would be the latest twist in the tale of one of gaming’s most unlikely CEOs.
In 2001, John Hanke co-founded a mapping technology company called Keyhole that would later be acquired by Google and be foundational in the development of Google Earth and Google Maps. In 2010, Hanke, riding rarified success chose to lead a team inside Google on something until that point unproven: augmented reality gaming.
The internal Google unit launched the global augmented reality game Ingress in 2013 and amassed seven million players by 2015. Ingress doubled as a proof of concept for their next project. In 2015, Hanke spun out the group into an independent company, forming Niantic, and a year later the studio launched Pokémon Go in collaboration with (and significant funding from) Google, Nintendo, and The Pokemon Company.
By the end of the year, Pokémon Go had been downloaded by more than 500 million players.
In the years following Pokémon Go’s success, Hanke spoke at numerous conferences about the bigger potential for augmented reality to connect the real world with the artificial one. He imagined ways augmented reality could place players into shared virtual worlds while they occupied a physical one, all with the support of Niantic’s tools. That was in 2019. In 2020, Covid-19 kept millions of players in their homes.
Now, it appears Hanke and his team may be returning to what inspired them long before video games: mapping. The data collected by all the Niantic apps has been used to create large geospatial models in an effort to achieve spatial intelligence. Last November, Niantic’s Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu published an update on the project: “At Niantic, we are pioneering the concept of a Large Geospatial Model that will use large-scale machine learning to understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally.”
Because it’s 2025 and the answer is always AI.
