Niantic, the parent company of the once wildly popular Pokemon Go, is selling its gaming to Saudi-owned Scopely. The company will relinquish said division to a tidy sum of US$3.5 billion (~RM15.5 billion).
In addition to the gaming division, Scopely will also be acquiring Niantic’s internal development teams and companion apps for Pokemon Go, Campfire and Wayfarer. Peridot and Ingress will still be owned and developed continually by Niantic Spatial.
Launched in 2016, Pokemon Go was so popular at one point that, as with every trend of the time, it developed a subculture of explorers in the real world who were unnecessarily willing to risk life and limb to hunt down rare Pokemons. This writer has personally witnessed a friend using two phones to hunt down Pokemon while driving. Yes, really.
As to the nature of the purchaser, fans of Pokemon Go aren’t quite as enthusiastic about it. Scopely, which is owned by Savvy Games, is known for pushing the games-as-a-service agenda hard, and has aggressively monetised its games, including Marvel Strike Force and Star Trek Fleet Command, to name a few.
Needless to say, many Pokemon Go players have threatened to stop playing the game over the sale to Scopely, for fear that it would apply those same monetisation practices to the AR title.
