Today Niantic announced some radical changes to its businesses, including the sals of its most popular games and the spin-off of its geospatial AI business.
According to the announcement, mobile publisher Scopely is acquiring Niantic’s popular mobile titles Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now, including the development teams working on them.
The transaction involves $3.5 billion from Scopely with an additional $350 million of cash from Niantic itself to be distributed to equity holders.
According to Niantic, the purchase by Scopely ensures that the games will have the long-term support needed to endure for future generations. This should also ensure stability for existing players, who shouldn’t expect things to change too much as expressed in a message by Head of Pokémon Go Ed Wu.
Wu describes the deal as a positive step for players and for the game’s future. While he can’t promise that Pokémon Go will remain the same, as it has always been a work in progress, how “it’s created and evolved will remain unchanged” with the hope of making it even better.
As mentioned above, the second branch of this new direction involves the spin-off of Niantic’s Geospatial AI business into a new company named Niantic Spatial.
It’ll be funded with $250 million of capital, including $200 million from Niantic itself and a $50 million investment from Scopely.
The business’ stated goal is to “build spatial intelligence that helps people better understand, navigate, and engage with the physical world.”
Niantic claims that its technology is “powered by a third-generation digital map that captures the content of the world at a level of fidelity never before achieved and enables both humans and machines to understand it in ways never before possible.”
According to the company, it will lead to enabling AI to meaningfully understand and interact with the physical world.
The Niantic Spatial platform, which was introduced in 2024, includes spatial computing, Extended Reality, Geographic Information Systems, and AI to create immersive experiences that, according to the company, can “blend the digital and physical worlds with centimeter-level precision.”
It can be applied in a variety of industries including manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, construction, tourism, entertainment, and education.
More elements of the technology are the Visual Positioning System (VPS) used in Pokémon Go and more, Scaniverse to create 3D models, and more. It has evolved from a consumer technology into an enterprise-grade solution that can be used by companies in various industries.
The next step is the development of a Large Geospatial Model, which is a model of the world powered by large-scale machine learning with the goal of enabling people and machines to understand and navigate the physical world.
It’s based on a proprietary database of over 30 billion posed images, which form the foundation for geospatial AI, aiming to enable a deeper contextual understanding of the real world
Incidentally, Niantic Spatial will continue to run Niantic’s remaining real-world AR games, Ingress Prime and Peridot, showcasing the power of its geospatial platform.
