Scopely and Niantic chronicled the late nights and knotty technical problems they overcame on the road to that blockbuster $3.5bn acquisition at the iicon conference yesterday.
Goldman Sachs’ Hemal Thaker hosted the discussion between Scopely chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien and Niantic president Ed Wu as they talked through how the deal came about, what it took to get it over the line, the efforts made to integrate the two companies and what has happened since.
Scopely’s O’Brien stated that given the amount of M&A Scopely is engaged in, “there are times where deals don’t go well” – but the Niantic acquisition has gone “exceptionally well”. He also claimed that Niantic has seen double digit year-over-year growth across its portfolio since the acquisition closed.
Working with IP collaborators the Pokémon Company, Nintendo and Capcom has also been pretty smooth, despite some initial trepidation. “The partnership with the IP partners couldn’t be stronger now,” said O’Brien, noting that “there was some concern as we came in.”
The pre-deal courtship
Recalling the early discussions between the two companies, Niantic’s Ed Wu said the Pokémon Go maker was “looking for somebody who really understood who we are, what made us different, what made us successful, and could bring us to that next level by helping them up our game.”
Wu also said that Scopely’s C-suite spent “immense amounts of time” with Niantic’s leadership as the deal was getting thrashed out – even as many of the execs involved were also dealing with the fallout from the LA wildfires of January 2025.
He also expanded upon the common ground between the two companies. “We share this deep value and appreciation for the fact that games are not just a codebase or a set of users,” said Wu. “They’re actually a deep relationship between the team that creates the game and the community that surrounds it.”
Scopely as an acquirer
“I think Scopely is probably well-known in the industry for the headline amounts that they can spend on acquisitions or user acquisition,” said Wu, suggesting that the Savvy-owned firm is more than a group of wealthy financiers.
“They have a very disciplined and thoughtful process of understanding the game, understanding how the game interacts with the community and its players, and understanding the overall market,” Wu continued, while adding that Scopely is focused on “investing whatever is necessary” to make an opportunity succeed.
Scopely’s chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien picked up the story from here, and walked through the nuts and bolts of the deal. It was a complex process because Niantic was effectively a “games business inside of a technology business”, he said. And a lot of thought and effort was required to separate the two.
Understanding Niantic’s tech
“Even though we have a number of strong technologists and we have a 20 person corporate development team and an integration team – and we’ve completed billions of dollars of transactions and gone through the process many times – this one was unique,” he said.
O’Brien described both teams working seven days a week, making “a ton of phone calls”, sometimes in the middle of the night, and described “people sitting in offices trying to understand how this technology works” as the two companies got to know each other.
He also joked about the strain placed on the execs’ marriages during this spell – but said that what got the deal over the line was Scopely’s hard-won understanding of the intricacies of Niantic’s business. Once the technology side of the company could be separated out, it was clear that the success of Pokémon Go and its other titles meant Niantic could be “a self sustaining, independently run business” by itself, said O’Brien.
“Sometimes when we acquire assets, they need a bunch of services from Scopely – they need a marketing infrastructure, they need a technology infrastructure…here [Niantic] had most of the things they needed.”
On Pokémon, Nintendo, Capcom and community
Working with IP holders The Pokémon Company, Nintendo and Capcom added an extra wrinkle, O’Brien continued. “When you’re working with three incredible global franchise IPs, with Pokemon Go, Nintendo and Capcom, you have that, plus the community element – I mean, the community element is the game,” he said.
“So we had to go very slow and be very thoughtful in how we engage those partners and how we engage the community. Ultimately we did that with Ed and his team…we took their advice on how those partnerships were going to be formed over time…we did not just come running in and say, ‘This is how we think we should do it’.”
O’Brien added that the months and months of work Scopely’s integration teams put in place before the deal closed helped smooth the transition a great deal, too. Scopely’s prior experience of becoming part of Savvy also helped.
What happened next
Once the deal closed, Niantic’s Wu said integrating the two companies’ data pipelines was one of the first things that helped to guide Niantic’s strategy and analytics. He also praised Scopely’s ability to “recognise opportunity and scale it” when it comes to titles with unrealised potential, like Pikmin Bloom.
Niantic knew that the walking-themed Nintendo collab had great retention metrics, and Scopely has helped Niantic invest more into the team, the game and its marketing since the deal closed. Wu claimed Pikmin Bloom has seen huge success in the last year, particularly in Taiwan, and said year-on-year DAU is up 80%.
And that investment in Niantic’s games will continue over the next ten years and beyond, added O’Brien. “We’re not a publicly traded company,” he said. “We don’t have the type of quarterly pressures that other gaming businesses are under and we have a very long term horizon view.”
Special thanks to Jon Hicks of gamesindustry.biz for his invaluable help with this report.
